


The Winter Prince

by orphan_account



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, High Fantasy, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn, updates tuesdays
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-02 05:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19193029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Taako is nobody’s saboteur. He’s just an ordinary assassin just trying to make ends meet, staying out of trouble (mostly) and keeping his nose clean (sometimes). But when a mysterious buyer makes him an offer he can’t refuse in exchange for the head of the neighboring prince, he ends up falling headfirst into the tangle of a foreign court — and the arms of its ruler, Prince Kravitz.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Magic:** the basic D&D system, spell slots and all. May have occasional flourishes of homebrew.
> 
>  **Time Period:** a special little era I like to call “anachronism soup.”
> 
>  **Geography:** although this universe uses a lot of the same names as the world of 5E, that’s mostly for familiarity’s sake — I've taken a bunch of creative liberties with geography and terrain, especially with everything north of Neverwinter. We’re in uncharted territory here, folks.

They never ask him about the bloodstains.

Which is just as well, considering. It’s not the most glamorous part of the job, and if it were all the same to Taako he’d prefer not to dwell on all the time he’s wasted trying to get viscera off his clothes. And it makes sense that of all the things to inquire of an assassin, his strategy for cleaning the good silk ranks rather low on the list. 

(Cold water, a tablespoon of salt, a good soaking, then a regular wash cycle. A bit of familial wisdom, there; Auntie Taaco was never wrong when it came to unscrupulous stains, be it blood or other fluids. A staple of his education, old Auntie Taaco was.)

Nevertheless, it preoccupies a surprising amount of his time — bloodstains, and the process of making them.

They never tell you about them, either, he thinks idly, dropping a whole load of blood-soaked laundry into the washing bin. The heroes in the old songs are always prancing around hacking out each other’s throats, but do the bards ever mention how a cut jugular will spray over your clothes? No. False advertising, really, if you want Taako’s opinion. Absolute bunk.

He watches murk billow off the fabric in a cloud of dirty reddish brown, turning the whole barrel the color of clay sludge. Dried blood peels and flakes from the silk. Little clumps of viscera rise to the surface, bobbing up and down in the water like the heads of lost sailors thrown from a shipwreck. 

Did he forget to take his wallet out? Shit.

He palms his pocket. No. Safe. Good. He blows out a long breath of relief, drops the lid over the barrel, and leaves it to soak.

The tavern stirs in the faint light of morning. It’s not half an hour past dawn and already maids scurry up and down the hallways, bearing loads of sweet-smelling laundry and breakfast trays, murmuring wakeup calls through the thin wood doors. Taako flips the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob before he leaves the room, and gives one of the maids the stink-eye as he trots down the stairs. He doesn’t want anyone nosing around. Not that he ever leaves anything behind he couldn’t stand to lose, but still. The idea of people poking their fingers into Taako’s shit while he’s not there gives him the heebie-jeebies something fierce.

The pub smells of freshly baked bread, frying bacon, cooking grease, and fresh coffee. It’s exactly what a kitchen ought to smell like in the morning, all friendly and warm and full-bellied. A steady stream of people stirs the front door to near-perpetual motion, swinging back and forth as crowds swell to fill the warm, cozy room. Murmurations of laughter explode from the tables; amiable chatter stirs the corners.

Taako slinks around and out the back door.

In the courtyard, the lamps still light the stone. A small fountain spits grey water into a pewter bowl, and threadbare clumps of wisteria hang from the arches. Lup sits on one of the benches in the shade of the trellis, her book splayed open over her knees, a mug of coffee cradled in her hands. She’s absorbed in her reading; she’s nibbling absently at her thumbnail, which she only ever does when she’s lost in thought. She’s wearing a simple, loose-fitting pair of blue trousers and a white blouse, tied at the waist with a red sash; her hair is piled up on top of her head and stabbed through with a chopstick. 

To Taako’s absolute horror, their outfits very nearly match. It’s bad enough, being twins, without everyone thinking they’ve got a  _gimmick._

He doesn’t announce himself, but instead sidesteps into the cover of the trellis and ducks behind one of the pillars. Grinning, he casts Prestidigitation with a quick snap of his fingers.

From behind the pillar, he can hear the water balloon explode over the bench. Water splatters the pavement. He claps his hand over his mouth, snickering, and waits for the squawk of indignation.

It doesn’t come.

He pauses, frowning, and then ducks around the pillar. He’s no sooner stepped out of the shade than he’s tackled to the ground in a flurry of limbs, driven hard to the concrete face-first. He lets out what a slightly undignified shriek and attempts to scramble onto his back, but the hard press of a knee against his back holds him still.

“Ha!” someone says triumphantly, close to his ear, and he groans.

“C’mon, get off me, Lulu, that’s cheating.”

The weight lifts from his back. He spits out a mouthful of dirt and shoves himself up, mourning the loss of yet another good blouse.

The illusion of Lup on the bench shimmers and fades. The real one, standing in front of him with a ruddy grin on her face, sticks out her hand and hauls him to his feet. Her blue eyes glitter with a ferocious kind of victory. They’re his eyes, too, although she tells him they look better on her. 

“Got you, baby brother,” she says.

“We were born at the same time,” he grouses. “You’re older by all of  _zero minutes.”_

“Baby,” she says, seriously, and before he can call bullshit, she tweaks him fondly on the ear and jerks her head towards the street. “Come on, let’s get breakfast. You’re paying.”

 

* * *

 

Taako and Lup are born in 342 C.F.E. That’s three hundred and forty-two years after the establishment of the Kingdom of Faerun, and twenty-six years into the reign of King Artemis I. By the time they’re a hundred and four, the country is sixty years into the reign of King Artemis IV. 

Taako loses track of who’s who in the royal dynasty sometime in his early forties, and stops caring not long after. Having human blood on the throne was a pain in the ass, in that way. Turn your back and three kings have died. Blink twice and you’re eight years into a civil war over the line of succession. You’d never see that shit with elves; when elves were pissed at each other, they just sat and brooded about it for a few centuries, like normal people, and then never spoke of it again.

They wander here and there, he and Lup, traveling from town to town as it suits them. They never stay anywhere permanently, and nobody ever stays with them. Sometimes there are people who come and go — another orphan boy, once, who caught a ride with them to Raven’s Roost, or a half-orc girl running from her father, or once, memorably, a circus — but it’s just that; they come and go. Lup and Taako are a pack of two. Perhaps their traveling companions always notice that, the way that no matter what, no matter how anyone else pries or pushes or promises, they never drop guard around anyone but themselves. Perhaps that’s why they always go.

When they’re forty, and still round-faced with a youth that makes older elves coo and pinch their cheeks and other species give them unnerved looks when they rattle it off to a barman, they discover magic. It’s Lup who starts digging up old magical instruction texts in public libraries, but it’s Taako who cobbles together spell components by lightening the pockets of passing merchants, nicking a pinch of something here, a little token there. There are no teachers for orphan runaways, nor slots open at the grand academies of magic in Neverwinter. They work it out for themselves, the ancient thrum of energy between their fingers, the pulse of something sacred in their palms.

Taako figures out that he’s got a knack for transmutation wizardry and Lup’s a menace with an evocation spell, although they don’t consider themselves bound to one style or another. They’re jacks of all trades, perennial dilettantes. They can both darn a sock and mix a drink and rob a man blind in a game of cards, and they’ll do it with the same tinkling laugh, like whoever tried to beat them should have known he’d never had a chance. They can both shoot an apple off someone’s head at sixty meters and nail an artery at eighty. 

He’s fast and she’s clever. He’s dangerous and she’s deadly. They’re twin parts of one being, the Lup-and-Taako, a person in two acts.

Whenever someone asks how they learned something, they flash identical broad smiles and chime, “We’re generalists.” 

And they don’t say: most of it is adaptive instinct. If spend enough of your life just trying to survive, it becomes its own kind of trade.

On his one hundredth birthday, they a letter of inquiry from the Assassin’s Guild.

Which isn’t unsurprising, considering. The A.G. can’t recruit until the target hits the age of majority for its species, which for elves falls later than most, but it still keeps an eye on persons of interest. Key traits include a) magical proficiency, b) a lack of other options, and c) having few people who would miss them, if they were gone.

It ends up being Lup and Taako’s first real fight in thirteen years.

Lup says  _think about the money_ and Taako says, _think about the risk,_ and she says _Risk, what risk, we’re already risking our lives every day, what about this risk is any different,_ and he says _But if we get caught_ and she says _So we don’t_ .

And then he says _What if I do it. Me. Just me._

And Lup purses her lips and gets that look on her face that says she’s still working out whether she’s going to punch him or hug him. And she says _Fine_.

And that’s that.

Surprisingly, Taako doesn’t hate being an assassin. He doesn’t love being told who to kill and when, since he tends to work best as a free agent, and he’s not super hot about giving a tithe of his earnings to the A.G. in exchange for fuck all in employee benefits. But he’s good at his job, and it’s a nice change of pace to reach in his pocket and reliably have a bit of gold waiting for him. For the first year or two, it’s small fry — old debts, petty vengeances, credit unions, that kind of thing. Then he bags a couple of big-name statesmen from Waterdeep, almost incidentally (he accidentally poisons the wrong guy, and he has to cycle back and stab the right one when he figures it out; he consequently spends three months underground while the whole Sword Coast turns itself inside out trying to find the source of the apparent political coup. His employer congratulates him on successfully disguising the assassination with a red herring killing, and tips him double. Taako rolls with it, because hey, happy customers are return customers. Lup laughs her ass off about it all.)

All of a sudden he’s not small fry anymore. All of a sudden he can afford a room and board in Neverwinter, on a street where merchants live, and real magical books, and nice clothes, and good food when he wants it. And it’s not perfect, but it’s … nice. 

As nice as life can get when you’re paying rent with blood money, anyway. 

Lup gets a job working in an alchemist’s lab. She loves it more than she’ll ever admit to; she likes the science of it, the way it lets her bend the fundamental underpinnings of magic to her will. Stone into gold, that kind of thing. They’ve not yet managed to get any royal patents, but she says it’s only a matter of time.

“We’re getting into real magic,” she says, and he scoffs and feels like asking,  _And what am I doing, parlor tricks?_ “Higher order transmutations, rewriting the rules of alchemy. They write books about stuff like this.”

“They write books about what I do, too,” Taako drawls, “but you don’t see me winning any prizes for scientific inquiry,” and she scowls and pokes him. 

“That’s because you’re not doing alchemy, dummy.”

“Nah,” he says, and stretches out on his bed, catlike and yawning. “I just ice people for a living. Totally boring. A real snoozer.”

“Jealous, much?”

“Oh, totally. Hey, do you think you could hook me up with a job at your nerd factory? I’d like to drop a few billion levels in swag instantaneously.”

Then she vaults onto the bed to give him a thorough noogie, and he yelps, wriggling out of her grasp. He has to wrestle her onto the floor in retaliation. 

So their life is better than it used to be. Which feels new, and weird and uncomfortable all at once. And if Taako lives with his back to the corner and one eye over his shoulder, well, it’s not like he wasn’t doing that before. 

The important part is that they’re happy. The rest doesn’t matter. Nothing else does.

 

* * *

 

Breakfast is a box of fried pastries from a street-side vendor, steaming hot out of the frier and coated with cinnamon and powdered sugar. They eat side by side on one of the benches in the market district, watching vendors open up their stalls and shake the rain off their tents. The year is crawling steadfastly towards winter, and with it come a host of evening storms, ruining any uncovered stalls. The trees have shed most of their leaves, and lay a fiery carpet across the flagstone. The pastries are warm and so sweet they make Taako’s teeth ache, and the air smells of damp stone, and there is laughter everywhere, laughter in the clink of coin as it changes hands, in the delight of small children darting between the stalls to survey the grand menagerie of goods.

“Look at how small that one is,” Lup says, pointing. “We were never that small, were we?”

“Not since we were twenty, at least.”

“It’s gotta be what, five?”

“Five and thirty, yeah.”

“No, it’s human.”

“Oh,” Taako says, and squints more closely at the little bugger she’s picked out. A tow-headed pint of a thing, all wobbly legs and a frilly cornflower blue dress. Her ears look a bit pointy to Taako, but maybe she’s only half-elf, or less; whatever her parents are, they’re either blind or tasteless, because whoever tailored her dress ought to be taken out and shot. “Maybe.”

Lup slings her legs up over Taako’s lap and uses him as a footrest. He shoves at her irritably, but it doesn’t dislodge her, and he doesn’t put the force behind it to try. “Some human girl at work is having kids.”

“Kids, plural? Do they spawn in litters?”

“No, I mean she’s having one right now, and more later, maybe.” Lup pauses, and holds her hands over her belly. “She’s already starting to get big. And she can’t drink.”

“Ew,” says Taako.

“Yeah. Her boyfriend is a corporal in the crownsguard. Total square, but she likes him.”

“Double ew,” says Taako.

“Well, I know. But she’s happy, even though she’s pregnant at twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six,” Taako says incredulously. “Lulu, I don’t even remember anything from when I was twenty-six.”

“You’re a hundred and four, so duh. But most humans won’t make it that far.” She pauses. “And we don’t know that many other elves.”

“I don’t know where this is going, and cards on the table, I’m kind of bored, so if we could get there soon—”

“I’m getting there, dingus.” She swats his shoulder. Then she takes a pensive bite of pastry, chews, swallows. He watches her, apprehensive. 

Through a mouthful of dough, she says, “Taako, did you ever think about the fact that most of the people we know are going to die before we do?”

Taako blinks. The answer that brims on the tip of his tongue is  _Yeah, duh, obviously; why, does it bother you?_

But he reads in the unhappy set of her mouth that it won’t go over well, and walks it back, although truth be told he doesn’t know what to say to something like that, doesn’t know what she wants to hear. Sometimes he understands what his twin wants if they share a prefrontal cortex. Sometimes she’s a foreign language in a forgotten script. “Yeah, sure. All the time,” he deadpans. “That’s a totally normal and not at all creepy thought to have, Lulu, thanks for sharing.”

“I’m serious. That kid right there, the tiny one? She’ll be six generations in the dirt before we hit middle age.” Lup chews on the pastry with an odd, rote plaintiveness. “That ever bother you?”

He nudges her. “Are you trying to call me old or something?”

“We’re the same age,” she says irritably, and he realizes abruptly that she’s not in the mood for jokes. Which is strange, because . . .  _Lup_ . “Humans have to rush through everything, you know? And we don’t. Hell, we’re not even adults until we’re already old enough to have outlived almost every human we were born with. And there are still half-elves running around everywhere. Proof that somewhere out there, some elf decided to boink someone who’d almost definitely die before them.” She seems like she’s working herself up to a point, but at the last moment she falters, and skitters away from it. She starts idly tearing chunks of pastry off and tossing them to the pigeons, who clamber over themselves in a flurry of feathers trying to reach the feast. “Isn’t that kind of crazy?”

“I always thought half-elves were weird,” Taako offers, feeling helplessly out of his depth. “I mean, the other half could be anything. Drow, gnome, goblin… it’s a really general term, is all I’m saying.”

Lup snorts. “How many half-elf goblins have you seen running around?”

“Why do you assume you can clock a half-elf goblin at thirty meters, huh? Maybe they don’t present the way half-human ones do. Ever thought of that? I mean, shit, it’s not like their ears can get pointier.”

“One,” she says, holding up a finger covered in sugar, “I’m not the asshole here. I’m just saying that if, by some infinitesimal chance, a goblin and an elf managed to breed—”

“Listen, if orcs and humans can do it, I’m not putting anything out of the question, is all I’m saying—”

“—then that kid would sure as hell look different from any goblin I’ve ever seen, and two: that’s not the point, so shut up. I’m getting to something.”

Taako huffs and slumps back against the bench, brushing sugar dust and cinnamon from his hands. She shakes her head.

“Unless we end up in one of the old elf cities,” she says, “where there’s no one else but elves—”

“Fat fucking chance,” snorts Taako, and she nods in acknowledgement before continuing. The problem with the old elf cities is that they’re old, and so they’re selective, and also generally full of fussy old assholes worried about bloodlines, and so without a legacy claim, Taako and Lup don’t have a snowman’s shot in hell of getting in.

“—we’ll pretty much always be saying goodbye,” she says. “To everybody. All the time.”

“Except us,” Taako says uncomfortably, because it feels like she’s forgetting. She glances at him.

“Of course,” she says, a little bit softer. “Right. But aside from us.”

Taako wants to demand who this new  _aside from us_ person is, since it’s the first he’s hearing about them. He also wants to not be feeling a hard nudge of resentment against the idea of it being inserted so cavalierly into their life, the one he and Lup had carved out with blood and sweat and more than their shares of tears across literally decades, and  _aside from us_ had stood by and done fuck all to help.  _Aside from us_ had never put food on the table, or a roof over their heads, or kept danger away when it counted; more often than not, it  _was_ the danger, lurking in shadowy corners and deep alleys and anywhere else Taako dared to look. It wasn’t that he resented other people for not caring about two raggedy orphans from fuck knows where. He expected it. Taako and other people had a healthy professional relationship of mutual distrust. But when it came to the idea of  _them,_ of Lup-and-Taako, anything else was background noise, and as far as Taako was concerned,  _aside from us_ could go shove it.

He sprawls across the back of the bench instead of giving voice to it, because it’s an ugly thought and he’d prefer not to ruin his breakfast with it. “I dunno,” he says flippantly. “Humans are kind of weird. Hard to imagine one I’d miss.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is.” It is.

“Well, it’s not for me,” she declares, hauling her legs off his lap. It has the possibly intended effect of showering his trousers in powdered sugar, and he brushes them off with a grumbled complaint. “I’m going to miss Cedrica. And … other people at the lab, too.”

She sounds a little bit melancholy. Taako gives her a sharp look out of the side of his eye. She’s still watching the blonde kid scamper between stalls with the expression of someone staring down the barrel of a cannon.

Taako says, lightly, carefully, “So ‘other people’ is a human, huh?”

She freezes, and then springs up. “Shut up,” she says quickly. “I didn’t say that.”

“Is he cute? Never mind, he’s probably a massive geek, he’s got to be. There’s nothing else to recommend him.”

“I hate you,” she says, “and you’re wrong, and anyway, we’re just friends, so fuck off,” and he cackles madly while she kicks him in the shin.

“Well, it’s that or you’re in love with Cedrica, which would complicate things for a number of reasons, so—”

“I’m not in love with anybody,” she insists, glaring, “and I’m going to — stop laughing! — I’m going to work, since apparently you have all the maturity of a forty-year-old.”

“Sure,” says Taako, giggling unrepentantly. As she turns away with a condescending look, he calls, “Say hello to ‘other people’ for me!”

She flips him off over her shoulder.

He’s still snickering to himself when he gets up, a few minutes later. 

The remains of their breakfast have left sugar everywhere, papering his clothes and fingers. He casts a quick Prestidigitation to clean himself off, and watches in satisfaction as the shower of sparks clears over his newly pressed shirt. 

When he looks up, the kid from before is staring at him from across the pavilion, her mouth agape in wonder at the tiny token of magic. He arches an eyebrow at her.

“What are you looking at,” he demands, and she flees.

 

* * *

 

One of many differences between Lup and Taako’s jobs — and one of the more important, Taako would contend — is that while Lup has to arrive at the laboratory by a certain hour every morning, Taako can make his own appointments. It’s the joy of being his own boss.

When people want to hire him, they drop him a note via the Assassin’s Guild, and he reads it and evaluates their offer and decides whether or not he’s interested. If he is, he writes back, and they set up a meeting. They’re not often pretty places, their meeting spots, since the price of privacy is often quality of ambiance. But it’s a price that he’s got to pay, if he’s interested in keeping his face out of the wanted posters, and it has the added benefit of familiarizing him with every last seedy pub owner and dive bar proprietor in town, along with the other less-than-lawful folk who frequent them. 

It never hurts to be an acquaintance of the criminal underworld. It’s only dangerous if you get too friendly. Luckily, Taako’s never been accused of being ‘too friendly’ for anything in his life.

He rolls up to the Carrion Cart at about half past two. It’s a hole in the wall with bad service and worse food, which is why he likes it; between the peeling paint and the smell of mildew, there’s a low risk of anybody just wandering in. He tosses a silver to the barman, a crusty-looking orc with a hollow socket where his right eye should be, and obligingly gets waved towards a booth in the back. 

The only lights are the dim, flickering tallow candles that sit on every table. It leaves the faces of the other patrons mostly obscured, and only occasionally illuminated by the odd twitch of a candle flame. At this time of day, almost nobody’s around except the regulars and the drunks. 

Taako slips into the sticky leather booth and leans against the corner. He can see the whole room from where he’s seated, including the bar and all three exits. That’s what makes it the best table in the joint. (That’s why it’s the only one he’ll take.)

He draws a small red bead from his pocket and places it on the end of the table, where it just catches the edge of the pool of candlelight. Then he flips up his hood, and waits.

It doesn’t take long.

Fifteen minutes later a man stands up at his table across the room and makes is way over to Taako, picking his way carefully between the other patrons. He walks with a strange gait, Taako notices, his steps too smooth to be altogether regular, as though he were only half walking and half drifting on air.

He stops and hovers beside Taako’s table, as if dithering, debating something to himself. Then he picks up the bead, slips it into his pocket, and slides into the seat opposite Taako.

“Hello,” he says. His voice is a fairly flat and nonthreatening tenor, and Taako reluctantly tips up the brim of his hood.

It’s a human man. The age is hard to tell, because humans tend to be, but he’s hovering on the brink of middle age for his species, by the inkling of lines that have started to bunch at the corners of his mouth and eyes. A thin coif of salt-and-pepper hair curls back from a high, arched hairline and hugs his scalp in an immaculate shape. He’s slim, clean-shaven, and well suited by the rich grey coat he wears, with a high, tight collar and cufflinks that glitter gold when he primly adjusts his sleeves. He looks far too rich for a place like this.

“I don’t want to be indiscrete,” the man says pleasantly, “but just to ensure I haven’t got the wrong man: you are Taako, correct? I assumed, since the red bead would be an astounding coincidence, otherwise.”

Taako nods fractionally, and the man beams as if he’s offered a perfectly civil reply. “Excellent,” he says. “I’m John, in case that wasn’t clear.”

The guy is giving Taako some weird vibes, and it’s not just the cufflinks. “John,” he says skeptically. “Is that your real name?”

John’s smile grows even wider, and takes on a patronizing insincerity. “Really, now,” he says. “Do you know many people who use their real name when dealing with assassins?”

Taako winces, and hisses, “Hey, ix-nay on the volume there, bud. Let’s keep the a-word to a minimum, yeah? Since we’re in public?”

“My apologies. Do you prefer the term ‘hitman’? Or perhaps just ‘hired hand’? I admit, I’m not fluent in the . . . cant, as they say.”

“How about you don’t call me anything,” Taako whispers fiercely, “and I don’t stand on the table shouting, ‘hey, everybody, this dude’s hiring me to kill someone,’ since they’re basically the same thing.”

“If you insist on using veiled language to refer to everything about this situation, I’m going to have a very hard time communicating to you what I want,” says John patiently. “I would have been happy to perform this rendezvous in private, but since you set the terms of our meeting, I assumed you had accepted the risk of being overheard.”

“I don’t need you to bust out a cypher wheel,” Taako grits out, and a headache already mounts behind his temples, “but if we’re gonna work something out, you gotta convince me you can keep your mouth shut, or this is gonna be a real short conversation.” This type of client gives him migraines. It’s a whole class of customer, and one he’s never been great at dealing with, at that. Some rich lord or merchant wants an annoyance taken care of, figures he’ll hire an assassin on the DL, and then bungles the whole thing because he can’t last five minutes without flapping his big smug mouth about it to the nearest pair of ears. It’s horrifically stressful to deal with, to say nothing of the unprofessionalism.

John tilts his head to one side, all condescension. “Well, I could,” he says. “But that would rather defeat the purpose of paying off all these people, wouldn’t it?” 

He gestures broadly to the room.

Taako stiffens, and then sits up straight. When he takes another quick look around, he notices that at least half of the people in the pub are watching his table, and the other half are deliberately looking in other directions. At John’s gesture, at least three of them hurriedly avert their eyes.

The hairs on the back of Taako’s neck lift and tingle. His knee bounces. He’s calculating the time it would take to sprint for the door without thinking about it, planning the way he’d leap a table here, duck under that guy’s arm, maybe vault out the window if it came to it—

“Don’t misunderstand,” John says, and it rivets Taako to the spot. The man’s voice is still calm and even and unassuming. “This is not an ambush, Taako. I’m not here to do anything but talk. I’m only, ah . . . how to put this? In the business of insuring my assets. Even if they’re not my assets quite yet.” He smiles again, a broad one that flashes all of his perfect teeth, and something in Taako’s gut rolls.

“Kind of presumptuous, dude,” he manages. “Take a guy out to dinner first.”

“Tempting offer. But we’re here for business, now, Mr. Taako. Let’s not get distracted.” John sweeps his hand broadly at the room. He calls, “Leave us.” 

With a great scraping of chairs and rattling of tables, the collective occupants of the bar simultaneously rise from their seats and shuffle out. Even the barman slings his towel over his shoulder and heads through a door to the back. The only movement left in the room is the dance of the shadows under candlelight. 

“Better?” inquires John.

“I think we’re done,” Taako says tightly, and moves to get out of his seat. His nerves are on fire. His fight-or-flight instinct has progressed from ‘fight’ to ‘flight’ to ‘get the fuck out of there, homie, put your ass on the move or get bent,’ and he’s not inclined to disagree with it.

John’s expression has the guttering intensity of a low-burning coal, all simmering heat and veiled danger. And he’s  _still smiling_ .

When Taako makes to leave, John’s smile flickers. “Surely you don’t want to do that,” he says. “You haven’t heard my offer yet.”

“Not interested.”

“Not interested in ten thousand gold?” John’s voice curls up at the end with a hint of amusement.

Taako stops.

He closes his eyes.

He turns around and sits back down.

“I thought so,” John says, not without sympathy. “As you can see, I’m very serious about this business venture. I had hoped you would be as well.”

“Ten thousand gold,” Taako says incredulously. “How do you even — how badly do you gotta want—”

“Very badly,” John says simply.

Taako massages his eyes. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I — okay. On the off chance that you actually have 10-K to begin with, how the fuck do I know you’re not bluffing?”

John nods, as if this were sensible, and reaches into a satchel at his side. He pulls out a carved wooden chest the size of a large jewelry box, made of dark, rich wood, and engraved with an ornate crest of an open eye. He slides it into the center of the table and pulls back the lid, revealing rows upon rows of neatly stacked gold pieces, glittering in the dull light.

“Five hundred,” he says. “With another fifteen hundred waiting for you in a chest behind the bar, as a down payment. Eight thousand to follow in paper transfer to a bank of your choice, or cash.” He picks up one coin from the box and holds it out. Taako eyes it suspiciously. “Go ahead and test them,” he offers. “Cast Dispel Magic, Identify, whatever you prefer. They’re real.”

Taako picks up the coin and turns it over in his fingers. It feels like real gold, heavy, ridged along the sides, not charmed or transmuted copper. A smudge of soot on one side, perhaps from being handled by a blacksmith or a sweep. In some places the engravings have been rubbed away from use, as with most old coins. The rest of the batch look the same.

“Okay, fine,” he says. He makes a show of putting it back in the box, and while his hand is busy in the chest, he slips the coin up his sleeve. Pulling his arms up, he folds his hands behind his head and tosses his feet up on the table. “I buy it. You’re a bona fide. Let’s talk business.” His stomach rolls, and he keeps one eye on the door.

“Let’s do. I have — well, before I ask anything of you, are there any limitations on what you’re prepared to offer?” John folds his hands expectantly.

Taako waves a hand blithely. “Yeah, well, basic stuff. Nothing that’s not policy for the A.G. anyway.”

“Please enlighten me, if you would. I’m not familiar with your rules.”

“I mean, I’m a pretty basic guy. No kids, no kings, no cleanup.” He counts them off on his fingers. “First one’s self-explanatory. Second, I’m not gonna be the douche who goes down in the history books for killing so-and-so the eleventeenth and starting a war of succession or whatever. Not gonna do it. Find some other hit guy to do your job. There’s a lot of us. Shouldn’t be hard.”

John steeples his fingers, undeterred but curious. “And the third?”

“No cleanup,” Taako clarifies. “After it’s done, it’s done. I don’t stick around. If you don’t like the results, tough. You hired me to kill them, not to make sure all the chips fall where you want them afterwards. No coming after me because you didn’t end up getting the inheritance, or whatever.” He shrugs. “Also, I can’t guarantee that people aren’t gonna be pissed that the guy is dead, or even that they won’t suspect you. That’s a little thing I like to call Not My Problem. You should have figured that stuff out before you put a hit out on ’em.”

John huffs a chuckle. “So it’s a liability waiver.”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

He nods. “Sensible,” he agrees. “I understand. I believe I can comply with those terms.”

“Good,” says Taako, and slings his legs off the table. He sits up straighter, leaning in. “So who’s the guy?” Must be a real bastard, if he’s worth ten thousand gold. Then again, Taako doesn’t make a point of judging his marks.

John’s face takes on a curious, self-amused quality. “Bear in mind how much I’m willing to pay before I tell you,” he says. 

“For ten thousand gold? Yeah, consider it borne, my man.”

John folds his hands on the table, businesslike, and smiles. “I would like you to kill Prince Kravitz of the Winterlands.”

Taako stares.

The candle flickers and casts a rippling curtain of light across John’s face.

John waits.

By and by a small sound stumbles out of Taako’s throat. It was probably once a laugh, but somewhere along the way it was strangled by the weight of his own incredulity, and emerges as a petrified croak.

“Prince—”

“Kravitz, yes.”

“What part of ‘ _no kings_ ’—”

“But he isn’t a king,” John says, firmly. “As his title indicates, he’s a prince. And if you’re concerned about causing political turmoil, then consider that the Winterlands do not follow a traditional monarchic structure, and Kravitz has no heirs.”

There isn’t much known about the Winterlands, in Faerun.

The kingdom that shares Faerun’s northern border is allegedly huge, being three parts tundra to two parts mountain, and scarcely populated. Very few ever venture there. There’s not much to recommend it as a travel destination, and in terms of trade, its output is slim. It’s never been to war with any of the other neighboring realms, but it’s not exactly warm to any of them, either; it keeps to itself, as does its monarch. Rumor has it that he’s immortal. Rumor has it that he’s a demigod. Rumor has it that he’s a lot of things, but easy to kill is not one of them.

The Winterlands are also said to be under the protection of the Raven Queen. Which would explain why, in the dozen odd centuries that it’s been around, a grand total of no one has ever managed to successfully invade it.

“He’s also in good with the fucking Raven Queen,” Taako says incredulously, “who — FYI? — makes him kind of a hard dude to ice, seeing as she can just  _send him back_ .”

“You don’t really believe everything you hear, do you?” John gives him a disappointed look. “If every sovereign who claimed to be a god’s chosen favorite was telling the truth, you’d imagine much more of them would still be alive.”

“No, but like, the Winterlands are  _her_ territory, right, this isn’t a bedtime story—”

“Taako,” John interrupts, successfully cutting through him. “Much as I appreciate your caution, I happen to be informed on the subject. Anyone can be killed. And at any rate, what I require is not permanent. I merely need him dead, for however long you can manage to render him such.”

Taako blows out a breath.

“Why?” he demands, finally. “What do you have against him?”

“Do you make a point of asking your clients’ motivations? I had thought you were more discrete.”

“I run on a need-to-know basis, sure, but when it comes to axing a foreign head of state? Yeah, cha’boy kind of fucking needs to know why.”

John sighs, his expression plaintive. “Taako, there are some things that I can’t explain to you without revealing undue amounts about my private life and ambitions. It doesn’t do to offer that information freely, and moreover, I don’t think you want to know those things any more than I want you to. It makes you into more of a . . . liability, than you want to be.”

Taako’s mouth goes dry as old bone. John’s tone is, as ever, light, but it lacks warmth. “Well,” he says, casually, “I don’t wanna be a liability, that’s for sure, but, um. How about you give me a hint, huh? So I’m not walking in blind, here?”

John thinks. “How about this,” he says thoughtfully. “I have a few — investments, at present, that would profit from a certain degree of . . . chaos. In the Winterlands. Investments that the prince would make it his business to interfere with. And I don’t like it when people interfere in my investments, Taako. It’s tiresome.” The levity slips out of his tone seamlessly, replaced with a smooth, sharp edge. “Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Taako says, lying. “Sure. Prince K is a problem. For reasons. Got it.”

“Good.” John indicates the box. “So do we have a deal?”

Taako sucks a breath in through his teeth.

It won’t be easy, is the thing. It might not even be possible. He doesn’t avoid doing kings just because it’s politically inconvenient; it’s  _hard,_ since the bastards tend to wrap themselves up in a total cocoon of security. There’s a whole country’s worth of guards and castle walls between Taako and Prince Kravitz, not to mention the sizable physical distance of being a kingdom apart. He might not survive the attempt. Even if he does, he runs the risk of getting put on a goddess’ shit list, which is way up there with dying in terms of undesirable consequences. Bad things happen to people who fuck with the gods and their favorites.

He could just say it’s above his pay grade and leave. Walk away from John and his ten thousand gold pieces, tell him to get some other cash-poor sucker to carry out his suicide mission, and invest in a safer line of work.

John just smiles and smiles and smiles like Taako couldn’t surprise him if he tried. He smiles like he’s known how this conversation would go since before he walked in the door.

Taako says, “Five up front. Not two. And I want it in cash. None of this paper transfer bullshit.”

“Done,” says John immediately, with such readiness that Taako feels uneasy with it. “Anything else?”

Taako wracks his brain. “Uh, yeah. I — I want a horse.”

John blinks. “A horse,” he repeats.

“It takes a while to get to Shadowfell,” Taako says defensively. “I can move faster on a horse. And those things are expensive. I’m not buying my own.”

“Very well,” John says slowly. “I’ll throw in a horse. Would you like a cart to go with it?”

“No, just a horse.”

“Right. I’ll have that sent over immediately.” John pauses. “Anything else?”

Taako shakes his head.

“In that case,” John says smoothly, reaching across the table, “I think we have an accord.”

His hand, pale and smooth, hovers over the candle. Taako notices a heavy signet ring on his fourth finger, a fat silver band inset with a black opal and inscribed with the symbol of an open eye. It matches the lid of the box.

Taako grasps it.

“Deal.”

His stomach flips. But then John shakes his hand and draws back and stands up, and it’s all over. The deal is made.

“Good.” John straightens his lapel with two crisp tugs and gestures to the box. “Please, take it. They’re yours to spend, as is the one in your sleeve.”

Taako’s head snaps up, and he opens his mouth, stunned. But before he can say anything, John strolls away.

“Oh — by the way,” he calls, as he reaches the door. “One more thing. I’d like some proof of completion, if you could. A bit of evidence. When you come back — well. Should you return successfully, I’d like you to bring me his cloak.”

“His cloak?” Taako squints. “Why the cloak? Don’t you want, I dunno. His head, or something?”

John glances at him in amusement. “If you’d like to take his head, have at it,” he says. “For me, the cloak will be fine.”

“Really? Cuz — hey, dude! Wait!”

But John pushes through the door and glides out onto the street.

Taako jumps up and follows, shoving the box of gold clumsily into his satchel. He shoves through the door and stumbles outside, looking around for a glimpse of the grey doublet.

John is nowhere to be seen. He’s vanished into the crowd, like a being of ash and smoke.

 

* * *

 

“This is a dumbass fucking idea,” says Lup.

“Okay,” says Taako, crawling under the bed to fish out his boot. “First of all: yeah? Like, that’s kind of the brand? Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Taako? Been your brother for about a hundred and four years?”

“Oh, come on—”

“Second of all, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know.” The boot is hiding near the headboard, wedged up against the wall; he grimaces and wriggles forward. “In fact, you could kind of say that about the whole assassin deal to begin with. It’s not a wise man’s career path, know what I’m saying?” He grabs the boot and shuffles backwards. “Anyway, it’s not totally my fault. There are a lot of ill-conceived decisions that got us into this situation, and I only made most of them.”

Lup snorts. “Yeah, sure. You only agreed to do the damn thing.”

He bumps his head on the underside of the bed and lets out a sharp yelp. “It’s not like it’s for shits and giggles,” he mutters, rubbing sore spot. “You try turning down ten thousand gold, Lulu, tell me how it goes.”

“You only get the money if you actually  _do_ it,” she snaps. “Which you won’t.”

He sits upright. She’s perched on the bed, arms folded, scowling down at him. He tugs his boot on, ignoring the dust. “Ye of little faith,” he says indignantly. “I can do it.”

“You can’t.”

“Can.”

“He’s a prince, Taako.”

“And I’m an elf of extraordinary talents,” Taako deadpans. “He’s just some dude. Can’t be that hard to kill.”

“You’re not that hard to kill, either,” she shoots back, and he sticks his tongue out at her. “I mean it! He’s got — uh, hm, I don’t know, an  _entire kingdom_ on you, plus the favor of a literal goddess—”

“So I’ll brush up on my prayers to Istus, no sweat—”

“Like saving some shrimp from his own dumbass decisions is gonna be high on her list of priorities.”

“It feels like we’re no longer offering constructive criticism,” Taako says, shoving his heel down into the boot. He roots around for the other. “Do you get that feeling? I get that feeling.”

“It feels to me like you’re about to get yourself killed,” Lup says sourly. “That’s how I feel.”

She draws her legs up onto the bed and curls up, her arms folded and legs crossed, as if she’s trying to knot herself together.

Taako finds the other boot, and pauses. “Well, hey, now,” he says awkwardly. “I’m … listen, it’ll be okay. I’m a tough cookie. I’ll be fine.”

“I should come with you.”

“No, see, no, that’s — we discussed that, remember, we hashed that out real early on—”

“What? Are you worried it’s not  _safe?”_

“No, it’s just — less of a risk, alone, you know? And if things go south while I’m on the job, then you can come bust my fool ass out, remember?” 

Her lips twist in an unhappy line. “You’re better with me watching your six.”

“Well, obviously, but it’s not about safety. It’s about how much noise we make. I make.”

“You think I can’t do stealth?”

“You can do anything you want,” Taako grunts, hauling on his other boot. “But one elf traveling on his own is weird. Two elves raise questions. Especially in foreign territory. You know we aren’t common, up north.”

She falls back on the bed, blowing out a long breath. “We could disguise ourselves.”

“That’s a lotta spell slots, Lulu.”

“Take turns, then. Switch every other day.”

“Still a lotta spell slots.”

“All right, then. Fuck the risk,” she says suddenly, sitting up. “I’ll just come, and if anyone asks questions we can deal with it.”

“How? By killing them?”

“No.”

“Paying them off? They’ll still talk.”

“They’ll talk anyway. You can’t travel unnoticed by yourself, either.”

“No, but it’s a whole lot easier,” he says, and she glowers and folds her arms and stares at the opposite wall.

“You’ve got your job at the lab, anyway,” he says. He climbs up on the bed next to her and plops down. “People are counting on you and shit. Gotta clock in those hours at the nerd factory. You can’t just drop everything for a murderquest.”

“Screw the lab,” she says tiredly, but he knows her heart’s not in it. “It’s you.”

Taako snorts and looks away, face warm. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to that, so he just bumps her knee with his own.

By and by, he feels her arm loop through his. She sits up and gives a slight tug, and he slowly leans over sideways, settling his head against her shoulder. 

Her arm loops over his shoulder, and her head tips onto his.

“You shouldn’t do it,” she murmurs. “Give John his money back. Tell him to find someone else.”

He flicks his ear at her wordlessly, and she sighs.

“I know it’s a lot of money. We can find it somewhere else. There are always other jobs, right?”

He purses his lips.

“I mean, I know. I know! It’s hard to turn down.”

“You think?”

“But it’s still your life he’s asking for, basically. If you think about it.”

“All I do is think about it. I haven’t been able to  _stop_ thinking about it since I made the stupid deal.” He huffs. 

“So why—”

“Because this could be the last job. Like, ever.”

Her hand stills on his shoulder. “You’d go into retirement?”

“Kind of. This and the savings, they’re enough to live on while I figure out . . . something, I don’t know. Get apprenticed or some shit. Leave the Guild. Anything that’s not this.”

He can hear her thinking. If he concentrates, he can hear her thoughts moving in the same cycles as his did, three hours ago, the duel of point and counterpoint, the mental arithmetic lining up in neat columns of  _yes_ and  _no._ Can hear her read the result at the end of the calculations, and the hiss that escapes her when she realizes what it is, as though she’s been lanced in the side.

She bites her lip. “Fuck,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Ugly, ain’t it?”

She hugs him tighter to her side. “You gotta stop doing this, baby brother,” she says, slightly muffled by his shoulder.

“Trying,” he says. She doesn’t laugh but she sighs, a kind of shuddering exhale, and rubs his back.

“Come back soon,” she says. “Or I  _will_ go after you, and then the whole Winterlands is gonna regret it.”

“Yes’m.”

“And don’t let yourself get killed, either. I’ll be mad.”

“No way. Taako’s in it for the long haul, baby. Raven Queen herself couldn’t ice me, not if she tried for a hundred years.”

“That’s heresy,” she chides laughingly.

“If she thinks that’s bad, wait till she sees what I’ve got planned.”

At that Lup does laugh, tips back her head and lets out a full-bellied chuckle that rolls out of her in peals like the song of a golden bell, and he can hear the stormclouds in her head part. A little grain of triumph sprouts in his chest.

They have two beds, but tonight for the first time since they were children they sleep on the same mattress, twisted around like parts of a halved heart. When they lived with their aunt they always shared a cot, not that there wasn’t room for two; Auntie always said that they’d spent nine months curled up in the warm together, and now they were out in the world they couldn’t bear the cold.

Lup snores and Taako steals the blankets and they both kick like they’re brawling. They sleep like logs anyway.

The rain comes down in a howling fit all night. It’s still drizzling on the tavern roof when Taako rises, shrugging on his cloak and hopping around in the dark to find his rucksack. The sky’s dark, but he knows it’s near dawn from the smell of the grass and the prickle at the back of his neck. It’s said that sun elves can sense the time of day, being supernaturally attuned to the sun or some shit, but Taako’s pretty sure it’s just his circadian rhythms being fucked to hell.

He makes sure she’s still sleeping before he slips out.

 

* * *

 

Capitol of the Winterlands is a city called Shadowfell. It’s supposedly a three days’ ride from the border, but a three days’ ride in what direction nobody much knows. Traders will gesture vaguely towards the north, and some will even make an attempt at sketching out landmarks, but the path to Shadowfell seems to be one best traveled by memory, and memory is one thing Taako ain’t got. 

Maps don’t do it much justice, either, least not the ones you can buy in Neverwinter. Taako has to ride north for a day and change before he finds anyone that can even point him in the right direction. He tags alongside a group of merchants headed for some mountain outpost and travels wit them as far as the grasslands go, before splitting off. He doesn’t like to travel with any one group of people for long. Makes them too chummy, more like to ask questions and expect answers. Makes them more likely to remember him, if they’re ever asked.

The horse John sends him is a good one. It’s a chestnut brown mare with a white splotch down the front of her face, finicky but not unmanageable, and bred for travel. She doesn’t spook easy, which is good, because the longer they travel alone the more paranoid Taako gets; he takes to sending looks over his shoulder every other minute, checking for shadows on the road behind him.

Nothing follows. It’s mostly paranoia. Too much silence lets the brain breed its own parasites. 

He keeps moving.

North of Neverwinter, the sprawl of farmland quickly turns to grassland, which in turn wanders up to the foot of the Spine and stops. Not many traveling parties show up, after that; Taako rides alone into the mountains, with only the occasional caravan or wandering merchant for company. By the time he’s riding over snow, he can ride for entire days without seeing another human being. It’s eerie, especially high up in the mountain canyons, where sounds move strangely, and a mere whisper can echo for miles against the canyon walls. But such is the nature of the Spine.

The Spine, in the words of a famous cartographer, was the gods’ way of flipping the bird to cartographers everywhere. It was arguably the reason that Faerun and the Winterlands had experienced such remarkable peace. The sheer effort of moving an army through it was deterrent enough.

A range of enormous, utterly inhospitable mountains that spans the continent wide, the Spine’s caps remain perennially dusted with a perennial coat of thick snow and sleet. Its summits are bracketed on all sides by dizzying sheets of ice. Cliffs peel away from the mountaintops in ninety-degree drops to the ground hundreds of meters below, and the few footpaths that weave through its depths are prone to rockslide. 

The Spine stands against the horizon like a jagged scar, crusted in colors of black and grey and white, and not a sliver of green. Its storms are said to last for months. During the heart of winter, to cross the Spine is unthinkable.

Taako isn’t quite crossing it in the  _heart_ of winter. But it’s not so far off as to let him travel at ease, and he flinches every time a roll of thunder echoes somewhere in the distance. 

His horse plods along slim ledges that cling to cliff-sides, and he finds himself holding his breath until they’re across the gap. He lies awake at night watching the city lights of Faerun sparkle in the distance, and then, once he’s far enough that they hide behind layers of fog, he imagines them. He uses a rope to tie himself to his horse whenever he has to sleep somewhere precarious, and more than once he wakes up with a limb or two dangling out over oblivion, clinging to safety by less than half his body weight. When he screams, the sound goes skittering out over the mountains and meets no reply.

Up here, there is many a reminder of how easy it is to die.

He crosses the pass after four days. On the fifth, he works his way around the rim of a frozen caldera, climbs up a long ridge of loose stones, crests a vale, and without warning, there it is:

Shadowfell.

Spilled out at his feet on the plateau beneath him like an elaborate diorama, the city of Shadowfell rises from a hilly nest amidst the mountains. It’s a sculpture, a maze, a machine of dark stone and brick and cobble, climbing over and underneath and on top of itself like a living colossus, crowned in smoke, hemmed in mist. A woven net of thatched roofs and guttering chimneys stretches across the valley floor in jumbled lines of living streets. Vast cloud knolls roll in on either side, boxing it off from the long plains of tundra beyond, while squares of empty cropland ring the far edges, razed black and dead by winter. The buildings weave in tighter and tighter as they draw towards the heart of the settlement, which rises over the rest of the city on a large hill.

Shadowfell Castle is a monument to monuments. It is a temple, a citadel, and a work of art, the kind of place that a god might build if they needed a summer home. It is two parts cathedral to one part stronghold. The body of the fortress is assembled from successive tiers of pale stone, each rising from the next like a wide white layer cake. At least seven towers ascend from the walled body of the castle, with grey slanted roofs that narrow into iron spires scraping the very bottom of the sky, and deep-set windows wink from every wall and turret, shaded black by their jutting eaves. Trawling vines and snares of grey ivy loop in fine nets over the brick. Ridged parapets trim each tier, presumably fortified to the teeth. Snow veils the loftier towers, and a small forest encrusts it on its hill, bordering the bottom in frills of winter brown.

It casts a shadow over the city itself, absorbing what little sunlight wrestles its way through the clouds.

Taako takes a moment to stare.

Then he snorts, mutters “Pretentious,” and spurs his horse forward with a tap of his heel.

 

* * *

 

It’s a curious city, Shadowfell. Full of curious people, curious customs. They speak the same language, but peppered with odd phrases, the verbs and subjects broken down and reassembled in slightly different order, somehow sounding old-fashioned and new at the same time. Strange smells issue from the doorways of pubs and bakeries, clad in strange spices, strange sweets. Their clothes are different, too. For one thing, people tend to wear more of them, and favor pelts and leathers over cashmere and silks; where the merchants in Neverwinter sported slit sleeves and low necklines long into the autumn, here the wealthiest hide all skin but that of their faces, and even then, some cover that with woven scarves. The style of the season seems to be large furred mantles, which doesn’t surprise Taako. After half an hour riding through the city, his Faeruni cloak does about as much for him as wishful thinking under the onslaught of the mountain breeze.

When he asks a passing stranger for directions to the castle, the man stops, squints at him, and then points wordlessly at the hill.

Taako rolls his eyes and continues. People of few words, apparently.

Hiking the castle hill is a good bit of unexpected exercise. The sun’s already low in the sky by the time he reaches the top. He buys a scant dinner of stale bread and salted jerky off a passing merchant’s cart and eats it perched in the branches of one of the taller trees, watching people come and go from the castle.

A winding path cuts up through the forest to the front gates, where a troop of guards stand watch. The walls are cut too smooth to climb without help. The servants’ gate is presumably guarded, too, and it’ll be more trafficked besides. Less scrutiny, but higher risk of being noticed. There’s always the watergate — Taako learned how to use  _that_ particular vulnerability on a very unpleasant job in the less-than-distant past, although he’d sworn at the time to never repeat the experience — but those were often barred, and in a castle this large he’d likely drown trying to wriggle his way through before he could find a well to climb out of. Aerial infiltration was next to impossible, even if he could find some way to fly up and over the battlements. He could always tunnel under — if he wants to spend the next eighty years of his life breaching the first fucking wall.

Had to be the front gate, then. The large, heavily secured, fortified front gate.

Taako digs into his component pouch and mutters a slightly resentful incantation under his breath. It’s a sad use of a spell slot, trying as  _not_ to be noticed.

Twenty minutes later, when a group of dignitaries come rolling up the steps in a carriage, the guards wave them through without checking identification. Taako, invisible and clinging to the back of the carriage, rolls on through the gates without so much as a sidelong glance from either of the guards.

He sticks out his tongue at one of them. They don’t react. Obviously. Since they can’t see him. Nor can any of the servants that he strolls past once he’s inside the courtyard, making a beeline for the donjon.

It’s so pathetically easy.

_Sorry, schmucks,_ he thinks, almost sympathetically.  _Nothing personal. Guy’s gotta eat._

Then he pulls a face at them behind their backs, again, because what good is invisibility if a guy can’t have a little fun with it.

 

* * *

 

In a castle like this, he could legitimately spend the rest of his life just looking for the prince. Especially to the unfamiliar traveler, the interior of the castle is a strange, lavishly decorated labyrinth of dimly lit hallways, gorgeous, empty rooms, and vaulted ceilings that fling the sound of the slightest footstep across the whole castle. There are ravens on everything. Every banner and tablecloth and linen bears one embroidered on it somewhere, from the walls to the floors, as though people will forget what castle they’re in if they’re not reminded. The house sigil, of a white raven diving on a black background, hangs somewhere in nearly every room, either from the mantle or just above the door. 

Servants come and go like ghosts, slipping from room to room bearing loads of this and that, then vanishing into the innumerable spiraling hallways with uncanny silence. 

Taako pockets several pieces of fine china and nice silverware while passing through, as well as a tapestry and a vaguely heirloom-looking vase, but he holds himself back for the most part. Invisibility only lasts an hour, and he’s got to find the prince before it wears off. 

He can always loot on the way out.

After getting lost twice, he finally wanders his way across what he’s looking for. It’s embarrassingly close to an accident. He’s nearly resorted to throwing open every door he comes across when he opens one and stumbles out onto a balcony overlooking the throne room. 

His inertia carries him through the doorway before he’s really prepared for it, and Taako very nearly plows headfirst into one of the dignitaries already standing there. He catches himself with a comically exaggerated lunge to the side and pins himself desperately to the wall, barely stirring the hair on the back of the man’s head. Some people turn and glance at the noise, and Taako holds his breath; but when they see nothing they appear satisfied, and turn back to what’s going on in the room below.

The hall could fit an entire house within its walls. Every inch shines, gold hardwood floors polished so smooth they gleam like mirrors, black stone walls so smooth they could be volcanic glass, and carved stone arches bearing up the vast weight of the ornate vaulted ceiling. Marble pillars erected close to each wall bear up caged balconies that overlook the room, where dignitaries gather and flock like rustling moths to the room’s incandescent glow. Two windows flank the throne, but at this time of night, they offer no light; that honor is reserved for the seven brass chandeliers, each grander and ostentatious than the last, which hang in a row from the throne to the door. 

The throne’s silhouette dominates the room. It draws the eye with the inexorable tug of gravity, swallowing the room’s attention as a whirlpool swallows ships. Lifted above the floor by two sets of stairs, the seat itself is almost insignificant compared to its ornamentation: it sits underneath what appears to be two massive marble-wrought sculptures. Their size makes it difficult to immediately recognize what they are, since in periphery they seem only abstract sweeps of marble. At a second glance, however, Taako realizes they’re giant raven wings — curved to shield and frame the throne beneath them, as if the prince sits under the guard of some giant sentinel.

Then, of course, there’s the prince seated on it. Taako’s eyes fall on him last, after drinking in the rest of the room at large. Which is good, because once he’s looked, he can’t stop looking.

The prince is the most beautiful man he’s ever seen.

Reclining on the throne with the ease of someone born there, the Prince of the Winterlands is tall, with skin like midnight and eyes of star-bright gold. Long dreadlocks come to an elaborate knot at the back of his neck, each studded with a band of silver and wound together with a ribbon of purple velvet. Sharp, wide cheekbones give way to a firm, clean-shaven jawline, set in a neutral expression. He wears a waistcoat of a lavender so dark it verges on grey, swirled through with faint patterns of silver embroidery, and a high-collared white shirt, the cuffs of which emphasize the shape of his wrists, his neck, his waist. From his shoulders flows a broad mantle of seamless, almost oily black, woven entirely of feathers.

A scythe hangs in the loose grip of his right hand. Its blade runs length of a smaller man’s leg.

He’s gazing with what could politely be called respectful disinterest (read: boredom) at the dignitary speaking to him from the foot of the throne. Taako moves out to the edge of the balcony to get a better view. As he does, the prince turns his head slightly and lifts his eyes to settle with unerring accuracy on Taako.

A bolt of ice slides through his spine and roots Taako to the spot. Logically, he knows he’s got a good twenty minutes left out of Invisibility. Logically, he knows someone would have noticed already if it wore off. Logically, he knows the prince can’t see him.

That doesn’t help calm him one bit when the prince, continuing to stare at him, tilts his head and parts his lips, as if he’s wondering what Taako’s doing there.

Taako ducks behind some of the courtiers, head pounding like someone’s ringing in a wedding right behind his skull. He can feel his heart in his throat and his stomach simultaneously. Swiftly, he darts out of the balcony and back into the hallway, putting the safety of a wall between himself and the prince’s uncanny fucking laser vision.

It was a coincidence. He checks his hands, and they’re still see-through. He’s invisible still. So it had to have been a coincidence.

Probably.

He still can’t make himself go back out.

Which puts him in a rough spot, since in order to kill the guy, he’s going to have to look at him one way or another.

Different strategy, then. Taako forcibly pulls himself together, straightens up, and runs in the opposite direction.

 

* * *

 

It takes longer than he expected to find the prince’s quarters. He gets lost another three times, has to duck hastily behind a handful of tapestries once Invisibility wears off, and then has to cast it again out of necessity when it becomes clear that there are simply too many servants wandering around for him to move freely about the castle halls. Conveniently, the servants only light the parts of the castle that are being used and lived in, which means that as night falls, he can trace the signs of life by following which lanterns the servants bother to keep burning.

Taako also notices that most servants headed to the east wing of the castle carry things like sheets, towels, and laundry. On a hunch, he follows them, and ends up in a series of long hallways whose doors have names or crests engraved on them, and the servants knock before entering.

From there it’s just trial and error to find the royal suite. At the end of one hallway stands a pair of engraved black double doors with raven knockers, and when he tries he finds them locked.

Taako weighs his odds, decides he likes them, and casts Knock.

The spell hits a bit of resistance as it tries to wriggle its way through the door. Arcane lock, he’d bet, or some kind of warding that takes real poorly to Taako’s attempts to get in. Nevertheless, whatever it is, it’s not built to withstand magical assault — or maybe it’s just not trying all that hard, since servants have to be able to get in too — and the lock clicks after only a moment, letting Taako slink into the room.

The prince’s quarters are surprisingly modest. Coming from a guy whose living situation could otherwise stand as the poster child for the bourgeois lifestyle, the cozy sitting room that greets Taako when he closes the door would be better suited to a bookkeeper than a member of the nobility. A small desk rests in one corner, bearing a lamp, and a tall stack of books, attended by a single chair. An ample leather sofa rests before the glowing fireplace, complete with a small coffee table, upon which a single cup of tea has been stranded. There’s a closed door leading off from the main chamber, presumably to the bedroom.

An uneasy crawl runs up Taako’s neck, turning the skin there to gooseflesh. It’s almost too intimate, as if he’s somehow broken the man’s trust by intruding.

Which is ridiculous, because again: he’s trying to kill the guy. Of all the things to get weird about, seeing his sitting room can’t possibly be the most salient point on the list.

While he’s busy puzzling that one out, a raven alights on the windowsill.

He doesn’t notice it at first, hidden as it is by the gauzy curtains that sway slightly in the breeze. It doesn’t make a sound to announce itself, either. It just stares at him with one beady black eye, eerily motionless.

“Uh,” says Taako, in what is not perhaps his finest moment. “Hi?”

It leans forward, and for one truly crazed half-second, he thinks it’s about to speak. Then it lets out a riotous caw and leaps back off the sill, taking off into the night.

Taako goes to the window and draws back one of the curtains, peering out across the great black expanse. The raven’s gone, its feathers indistinguishable against the moonless night. A wide view of Shadowfell offers itself up in its place. Lights glitter from the buildings below like a bowl full of diamond dust. At night, the city metamorphoses into a different, more beautiful animal, characterized not by bleak landscapes and tangled, smoky streets, but webbed lines of light, which trail out like dew-strung spiderwebs into the void of the tundra.

But at night, the wind rakes in and slaps Taako full in the face with a touch as cold as tombstones. It leaves his face aching and numb, and he hastily slams the window shut. 

Why anyone would leave a window open in the dead of winter is a fool’s errand to guess. Maybe one of the servants forgot it while airing out the room. All he knows is that keeping it that way during this time of year, in this part of the world, is sign of a death wish.

Taako falls over on the couch and sprawls out. The seats have been warmed from sitting near the fireplace, radiating heat in a way that leeches the tension out of his bones, and it’s truly, luxuriously soft, with leather that yields like butter under his spine. He’d prefer this to most beds he’s ever slept in. The prince’s taste in furniture is immaculate; Taako wonders if he could manage to steal it. Might have to tuck it in a pocket dimension, or something.

As a matter of fact, he does get drowsy. He doesn’t fall asleep, exactly, but he does drift for a bit, in that hazy, comfortable warmth of the sitting room. The fire crackles pleasantly. Time slows and drips past like molasses, and he has to keep prying his eyes open.

An hour later — or it might be less, might be more, he can’t very well say — the lock rattles. Taako’s late in realizing it, too slow, too drowsy, and so when he shoots upright, the lock is already clicking, the doorknob turning. It’s too late for Taako to dig out the components for Invisibility, so he hastily vaults over the couch in a flurry of limbs and shoves himself up beside the door, pressing himself to the wall. Carefully, slowly, he draws out a knife from the sheath at his hip.

The door swings ajar. Taako braces himself, shifting his grip on the knife.

The prince steps into the room. Immediately thereafter he pauses, and his expression clouds with wariness.

Taako springs. The knife moves in a neat arc towards the prince’s neck — but he’s already moving, already whirling, his cloak flourishing behind him in a swirl of gleaming feathers, and the long, gleaming blade of a scythe flies up to meet it. The weapons meet with the shriek of steel on something immeasurably harder, and with a sickening  _crack_ like the splinter of bone, the knife shatters.

Taako doesn’t even have a moment to gawk at it. The prince flips the scythe in a fast, complex twist of the wrist that would have slit Taako from neck to navel if he hadn’t stumbled back quickly enough, and then lunges, the scythe arcing forward in a way that shoves Taako up against the wall.

The blade nestles against Taako’s throat. Taako gasps, because it’s  _cold_ , astonishingly cold, the kind of cold that stings and numbs the skin. He’s fairly certain that if the prince tugged, he wouldn’t even feel his throat being opened.

The prince holds it there. For the first time, Taako gets a good look at his face. 

Up close, his eyes are darker than they appeared at a distance, with a color closer to honey than gold. He’s scowling, but doesn’t seem to be afraid. In fact, the prince fails to appear even significantly intimidated by the fact that he just discovered an assassin waiting in his quarters; at best, he seems mildly peeved.

Taako, on the other hand, feels like he’s about to keel over and have a heart attack. The fucker could at least have the decency to look  _stressed_ .

“Hey, there,” Taako croaks.

His eyebrow arches with a truly insulting lack of impressment. Then he draws back, keeping the blade fitted snugly against Taako’s throat, and gives Taako a critical once-over. It doesn’t seem to clarify anything for him. His brow knits.

The Prince of the Winterlands tips his head in confusion and says, not unkindly, “What in the name of god are you doing?”


	2. Chapter 2

****Taako works his jaw a little and takes his sweet time deciding how to reply. The prince waits.

Eventually, he says, “Currently, or in a more, you know, general sense?”

“Let’s try either.”

The prince’s voice is arch and a bit mocking, ironed clean of the locals’ accent. His vowels are flat and his consonants are crisp in the way that they tend to be, up north, but like most members of nobility, his cadence belongs more to a class than a region.

Taako wets his lips. “Um,” he says. “Getting pinned to a wall.”

“Somehow, I figured that one out myself.”

Taako would giggle, but he’s wary the movement might accidentally cut open his jugular. “Right.”

“What are you doing  _here?_ ”

“Well,” he says, “there’s — the obvious.”

The prince waits.

“I had a knife,” Taako says. Then: “Not really a mystery, is it, my man.”

The prince snorts. Taako counts it as a victory, and then counts it as a double one when the scythe shifts away from his throat. It’s still close enough to kill him with a mere flick of the wrist, but at least now he can breathe without fearing for the sanctity of his epidermis.

“No, I guess it’s not.” The prince’s brow furrows in thought. “Who sent you? Are you a free agent?”

“What? Me? No. I’m here on contract. Strictly professional. Don’t even know the name of the guy paying me to do it, except he’s rich as shit and he hates your guts, big man. Me, I don’t have anything against you, personally. Besides the fact that you’re holding a scythe to my neck, which, I mean, that’s driving a real wedge in our relationship, I gotta tell ya.”

The prince stares at him. Another laugh stumbles, without any apparent intention, from his lips. “Who are you?” he asks incredulously.

Taako, who has just managed to clamp his mouth shut, is thus forced to pry it open again. “Taako,” he announces, and sticks out his hand. “I’d say it’s a pleasure, but it definitely hasn’t been for you, and I’m still in the dark about whether you’re gonna kill me, so on the whole it’s been pretty rough.”

The prince doesn’t take his hand. He does sigh, shoulders sinking, and draw back, his scythe dropping to hang inert at his side. “Taako,” he says. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“Oh, that’s great,” says Taako, surprised, and completely without irony.

“I wish you hadn’t tried to kill me,” the prince says pensively, “and I could, technically, sentence you to death—”

“Whoa, okay, not great—”

“—but I’m not going to, because it’s pretty clear you’re out of your depth.”

“Hey,” Taako says, bristling. “Just because I don’t have a sick cold-damage dealing sword or whatever doesn’t mean I’m out of my depth. I was pretty in my depth when I snuck in here without you noticing, wasn’t I?”

“This is not an argument that’s helping you,” says the prince, more dumbfounded than threatening. “Although — yes, you’re right — how you got into my quarters is an interesting question — are you a wraith?”

“What? No. The fuck?” Taako points to his ears, pointedly. “Dude. I’m an elf.”

“Well, right, yes, I can see that, but that’s not an explanation of how you got up here, is it?”

“Walked right on in, didn’t I,” Taako says, more than a little smugly. “Your guards waved me right through. Side note, you should deffo hire some better muscle to guard your castle. This baby might be prime real estate for siege warfare, but she’s vulnerable as shit to magic users.”

The prince’s expression clears. “Ah,” he says. “You can do magic.”

“Hm. I think — oh, what’s the word for this?  _Duh.”_

“ You were invisible,” he continues, as if he hadn’t heard. “That’s why no one else could see you, in the throne room.”

“No one  _else?”_

“I thought I was going crazy,” he murmurs. “Or that you were a phantom, or an apparition, or something. Figured for a second I’d finally started hallucinating out of boredom. You were — extremely distracting, do you know that?”

“I was invisible,” Taako says indignantly.

The prince shakes his head, smiling slightly. It’s a small, taut thing, barely more than a curve to his lips. “That doesn’t affect me,” he says absently, and with a slight wave of his hand he banishes his scythe into a curl of black smoke. He turns his back on Taako and goes to the table, where he sits down, apparently unconcerned by the threat of another attack.

Then again, if Taako could move the way he could, Taako would be unconcerned about it, too.

“So,” the prince says expectantly. He crosses his legs, reclining with far more leisure than Taako feels. “What’s the buyout?”

Taako blinks. “Sorry?”

“The price. Someone sent you here to kill me; they paid you a lot of money to do it. I’m a good sport.” Again, that nothing of a smile, less an expression of real humor than an acknowledgement that he’s made a joke. “Let me buy you out.”

“You’re going to buy out the guy who got paid to kill you?”

“What better way to ensure my safety?” The prince spreads his hands, expression innocent.

Taako edges toward the table, suspicious. “You don’t seem like you’ve got all that much to worry about, from my end,” he hedges. “What are you really paying me for?”

“Rather what it says on the tin. I want you to stop trying to kill me.”

“My guy’s paying ten thousand gold,” Taako says uncertainly.

The prince does not blink. “All right,” he says. “Cash? Or should I try and outbid him? You’ll have to tell me what you want, here.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. Is there something wrong? You seem bizarrely upset at the idea of being offered an exceptionally large sum of money to do nothing.”

“I —  _shit_ , I don’t — are you messing with me or something?” Taako slumps against the sofa, aghast. “This isn’t real, right? Like, who  _are_ you?”

It throws the prince off his rhythm. His hand stops in the middle of reaching for a quill, and withdraws, hesitant. It’s exceedingly apparent that he doesn’t know what to do with the question. It occurs to Taako that maybe nobody has ever asked it of him before.

He stutters, “I don’t . . . you know who I am, yes?”

“I mean, not personally,” Taako says, slightly flustered. “Shit, dude, you never even introduced yourself.”

A beat falls. The prince stares at him, a bemused incline to his head.

“Kravitz,” he says. “I’m Kravitz.”

“Hi, Kravitz. Hail and well met, or whatever.” Taako sniffs.

Another beat. It becomes immediately and alarmingly clear that neither of them much know what to do with the moment, which quickly calcifies and turns to an awkward, turgid silence.

Kravitz sighs, caps the inkwell, and sets it aside. “All right,” he says. “I’ll bite. You’re not from here, are you?”

“Hell no,” says Taako.

“One of the elf cities, then. Evereska hasn’t opened its gates for centuries, and you wouldn’t be this far from home if you were sworn to one of the courts, so . . . Mhiilamniir?” The elven word rolls flawlessly off his tongue.

“No,” Taako says, a bit sourly. “Not one of the elf cities. I’m Faeruni, my man. Straight outta Phandalin.”

“Faerun,” says Kravitz in surprise. “There aren’t many elves there.”

“Oh, really? Really, aren’t there? Wow, I thought they’d all just filed their ears down.”

“Sorry.” Kravitz dips his head, faintly abashed. “I suppose that would have been . . . obvious. To you.”

“No shit,” Taako mutters, leaning against the wall. “What about you, homeboy? You human, or what?”

“Basically,” he says carefully. “I was born human.”

“That’s extremely comforting.”

“Yes, well. It’s more complex than that. The Queen and I have an arrangement that complicates things.” He shifts, looking not uncomfortable, exactly, but maybe something cousin to it. Like the rest of his expressions, it registers in a muted, dignified way, evoking emotion without indicating anything less than perfect control over his composure.

“The Queen,” Taako repeats. He represses a shiver. If it’s possible, the air in the room seems to sink by several degrees. “You mean, as in . . . ?”

“I’m sure you can guess.”

“Is it all true, then?” Taako is breathless and he knows he’s prying, but he’s curious and the prince is answering all of his questions with probably undeserved candor, so he can’t help it. “The rumors?”

“What must they say about me, in Faerun?” Kravitz reclines in his chair instead of answering, evidently enjoying himself. “I’ve heard stories. Feathers, fangs — I think I heard one about me having a skull for a head, once.”

“So it’s true?”

“The skull? No.”

“I mean about the Raven Queen. You’re in good with her.”

Kravitz shrugs. “We have an arrangement.”

“Okay,” says Taako, slightly hysterical. “Okay. You have an arrangement with God. That’s cool. Fine. Very chill. Is that the reason for all the . . .” He flaps a hand vaguely at the room.

Kravitz lifts an eyebrow.

“The ravens everywhere? On the decorations, the banners, the statues in the throne room . . . ?”

“No, that’s unrelated, actually,” Kravitz says. He keeps an ironclad straight face, which is why Taako has to do a double-take to realize he’s joking. He splutters a laugh.

“Okay, wise guy. Fair enough.” Taako’s leg jitters. “So are you unkillable, or something? What are the perks?”

“Not unkillable. Immortal, theoretically.” He shrugs. “All the members of my house are. We usually retire after several centuries on the throne, let the next generation have a go at it.”

‘Centuries’ pricks Taako’s interest. “So how old are you?”

“Old.”

“For a human?”

“No.”

“For an immortal?”

“I don’t know why you’re so interested in this.”

“I’m a hundred and four,” Taako says, conversationally. “Are we at least in the same ballpark, age-wise? Give me something, here.”

The prince massages the bridge of his nose. “Same ballpark, different rules,” sighs Kravitz. “‘Age’ implies that I’ve continued aging, which I haven’t. Not for a few centuries. There’s a difference between living and not dying.”

“And the Raven Queen only springs for the second one?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, so it’s that weird shit,” Taako says, intrigued. “Like vampires?”

“I’m not a vampire.”

Taako folds his arms.

“That’s a completely different thing.”

He smirks.

“I’m  _not_ a — you know what, this is going nowhere.” Kravitz reaches for the quill with perhaps more haste than is strictly necessary. “I’ll get you your money, and you can be on your way, and we can both put this whole bizarre exchange behind us, hm?”

Taako opens his mouth — to object or agree, he’s not sure, and he feels oddly conflicted about it — but he’s silenced by a deafening roll of thunder. It explodes overhead like the explosion of some great drum, resonating like a blow to the back of his skull, as if the world itself is snarling and Taako is hearing it from inside its lungs.

It lasts for half a minute, maybe longer. It even startles Kravitz, whose surprise almost instantly fades into unhappy recognition.

Once its peal fades, and the ringing in Taako’s skull has cleared, he finally pries his hands off his ears and winces. “Shit,” he says. “What was that?”

“A storm,” Kravitz replies grimly. “A proper one, if the sound’s anything to go by — you said you came from Faerun?”

“Neverwinter, yeah.”

“So you came through the mountains?”

Something in Taako’s expression must answer for him, because Kravitz’s mouth tightens. “Of course you did. The pass is going to be snowed over by the time you can reach it. Even if you do get there in time, being in the mountains during this kind of weather, it’s—”

“Dangerous?” Taako’s stomach twists in an impromptu bout of nausea.

“Suicidal. People don’t come back from that journey often. Or ever.”

Taako blows out a breath. “Well,” he says, brightly, “Spine’s gotta end somewhere, right? I’ll take her the long way round. Circumnavigate.”

“And travel half the continent?” Kravitz is doubtful. “You’re talking about a four-month journey to accomplish a week’s worth of travel, and moving through some of the most inhospitable parts of the world.”

“The other way, then. Sail down the coast.”

“There’s a violent storm coming in,” says Kravitz, concerned, “and your first instinct is to go to sea?”

“Well, what else  _is_ there, I can’t exactly—”

“That’s just it. You can’t.” Kravitz shakes his head. “Believe me, people have been trying to find easier ways across the Spine for millennia. The pass is the only way we’ve got.”

“So I’m stuck here.” Taako spreads his arms in annoyance. “Fantastic! Let me just park outside the grounds, pitch a tent! Guess I’ll hang out here for however long the godsforsaken storm’s gonna last—”

“That would be the best option for you, yes.” Kravitz rubs his eyes. “Listen, I — I don’t like it any more than you do, and — if you want to risk your life, that’s your business, it’s really no concern of mine, but — you’re set on getting home, the fastest way there is to wait it out. They don’t often last for more than a few weeks—”

“A few  _weeks_ —”

“—and once it’s clear, you can cross back over in good time. Any other route will be half as fast and twice as dangerous.”

“And what am I supposed to do until then?” Taako demands, verging hard on hysteria. “Where am I supposed to go? I don’t know anything about this place!”

His words are chased by another monstrous roll of thunder, dropping a dampener on the conversation for a minute or so afterward. The prince takes a breath, glances away, and frowns, worrying his lip. 

Taako wonders if the idea occurs to both of them at the same time.

“You could—”

“I don’t suppose you—”

The prince looks up quickly, expression blank, just as Taako tips his head back to stare determinedly at the ceiling. “Sorry?”

“No, no,” Taako tells the ceiling. “You go first.”

“Were you going to say something?”

“No.”

“It sounded like you were.”

“I was coughing.”

“Kind of a weird cough.”

“Yeah, it’s an elf thing, and we’re very sensitive about it. Jackass.”

Kravitz snorts quietly. “All right,” he says. “I’ll just . . . listen, this highly unorthodox, but I suppose — since you really don’t have anywhere else to go — if you’d like, I’m willing to let you stay here.”

Taako smothers a yelp of victory. The pit falls out of his stomach, replaced with an airy lightness that buoys him up and floats the weight off his shoulders. He grins. “Aces,” he says coolly. “Decent of you.”

“Yeah, I — listen. Taako? I’ll only ask this once: please, please, please don’t make me regret it.” Kravitz is oddly serious, and Taako shifts uncomfortably under the scrutiny. “I’m only doing this because I don’t want to toss you out on your ass, as it were, and even though you did, technically, try to kill me—”

“Okay, that was an entire conversation ago, and I personally feel like I’ve changed a lot since then—”

“—I don’t think you’re a threat to me or the Winterlands anymore.” Kravitz pauses to let the terms sink in. “Now, if any of that changes—”

“It won’t,” Taako hurries. “Everything’s gucci, my man, don’t even sweat. I am a baller houseguest.”

“Good. I just want to make sure that we’re clear.” Kravitz smooths out the folds over his knees and rises fluidly, his cloak swirling behind him like disturbed oil. “I’ll have someone show you to a guest room.”

“Choice,” Taako says, a little hoarse from incredulity. “That’s great. Uh, thank you?” It comes out too much like a question. Irritated, he straightens his shoulders and tosses his hair, thinks  _confidence_ , and speaks again. “For your hospitality, I mean.”

“You’re welcome,” Kravitz says, with an absent air of dread that suggests he’s too preoccupied with regretting his decision to have heard any of it. Joke’s on him; Taako’s telling the truth. He is a baller houseguest. He’s lived with Lup for years, and she’s only tried to kill him a couple times.

Kravitz sweeps to the door. Taako hastens after him. 

In the hallway, the passing servants all stop and all duck into deep bows at the sight of Kravitz. Taako is reminded with a pang of unease that Kravitz is, in fact, royalty, and conferred with all the according powers and privileges of the rank, including the ability to do virtually whatever he wants with Taako. That shouldn’t startle him as much as it does. Taako’s a hard man to intimidate, sure, but even with a blade to his throat Kravitz never seemed dangerous in the edged, careless way that nobility usually do, as if they could have you killed for curtsying wrong and never lose a night’s sleep.

Kravitz points to one at random, a pageboy of some sort in a shabby tunic. The boy in question springs to attention and gives a heartfelt, if stiff salute.

“Take my guest to his room,” Kravitz orders, and Taako’s head near whips around at the sound of his voice: it’s plummeted an octave, and swathed in an accent so thick it verges on caricature, all long vowels and crisp dental consonants.

The pageboy bows again, bobbing so low his hair almost dusts the floor. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“And see him settled, would you? I’ve business to attend to.”

The pageboy doesn’t lift his eyes. “Of course, Your Grace.”

“Thank you.” Kravitz gives Taako a short, sharp nod. “Good night,” he says. His hands are clasped firmly behind his back, and in the light from the torches, his eyes catch and glitter like fine amber. If Taako’s not wrong, there’s something intrigued in the cant of his face. He seems like he’s waiting for Taako to do something unexpected — eager for it, even.

Taako very, very nearly says something suggestive. 

He catches it at the last moment and wrestles it back into a clipped, “Night, handsome,” after which he promptly pivots on his heel to face the page. “Lead on, my man,” he says, ignoring the temptation to wheel back around and see Kravitz’s reaction. If he reacts.

Taako likes pressing buttons. He can’t really help it. When he’s interested in something, he wants to see what it does, how it reacts to different provocations. If he can create something new with the same matter. It’s the art of transmutation: change under stimulus. Balancing reactions. Crafting diamonds from pressure and coal.

The pageboy indicates the hall to Taako, his head still bent deferentially. “If you’ll follow me, my lord,” he murmurs.

_My lord_ . Huh.

Taako likes that.

He trots after the page. On impulse, he does toss a look over his shoulder before they turn the corner, to see if the prince is watching; but all he catches is the door to the prince’s chambers swinging shut.

After winding his way down a long series of ornate, high-ceilinged hallways, the pageboy comes to a halt at the mouth of a row of brassy oak doors. He knocks twice, crisply, on the nearest, and when no answer comes he lets both of them in.

The guest room is lavish enough that if Taako hadn’t known otherwise, he would have mistaken it for the prince’s personal suite. The bed is enormous, layered with blood red coverlets and milk-white sheets, piled in enough embroidered pillows to bury oneself in, and crowned with a canopy of yellow satin. Pale gold walls glimmer in the light of a dripping crystal chandelier, and drapes of maroon brocade swallow the better part of the wall, cloaking what must be enormous windows. The furniture is all similarly lavish, with swirls of embroidery and chiseled carving touching every surface, as though the room’s designer had a fear of blank space.

“There is an adjacent bath for personal use,” the page says, gesturing to a small door leading off from the side, “and the bureau has some clothes for my lord, though if they do not suit my lord, a tailor can be summoned—”

Taako makes a noise of delight. The page, mistaking it for dismay, stammers to a halt. “If this does not serve,” he says worriedly, “I can find alternative accommodations—”

“No, what? No. Gimme.” Taako takes a few dreamy steps into the room, fluttering a hand at the boy. “This is fine. Go back to polishing silver, or whatever.”

“My lord is pleased?”

“Your lord is fucking  _pumped_ . Leave me alone, I’m going to sleep for a thousand years.”

“Yes, sire,” the pageboy breathes, relieved, and he ducks out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.

Alone, all the energy goes out of Taako at once. His shoulders slump. He tosses his satchel in the direction of the sofa, and it lands with a loud thud on the floor to the left.

He takes a few stumbling steps forward and then tumbles onto the bed. It is, predictably, soft as summer clouds, sweet-smelling, and an excellent reminder of the fact that Taako is exhausted. He’s still in his travel clothes, which is to say, swaddled in fabric one step up the quality ladder from burlap and four days out from its latest wash, so it’s not as though he’s keen on sleeping in it, but the bed is so comfortable, and the room is so warm, and the storm’s howling at the walls in a way that makes the space feel all the more cozy for it. And it’s the first time in the better part of a week that he’s sleeping in a real bed, an actual one, with something softer than his balled-up cloak for a pillow. 

Sleep pulls him under like a riptide, bearing him ruthlessly down into oblivion.

 

* * *

 

His dreams are distorted, like scenes viewed through a blurred lens. 

Shapes drift back and forth in pale facsimiles of color. They flock and crowd. Gaunt indistinguishable faces form and retreat from within a sea of grey mist. 

Faint moans echo around him, heard as if through deep water.

He’s drifting.

He senses things as if from outside his body. He’s disconnected from his limbs, no more in control of his movement than if he were a puppet latched to some idle showman’s strings.

Someone says his name. It’s a woman. For a moment, he thinks it’s his sister. But its echo sounds more like someone else.

And now he’s hurtling towards something, something vast and empty and writhing, and he can’t see it but he can feel—

Cold. An abundance of it, bitter and painful as a knife driven to the bone. 

He coughs, and something soft tickles his lips. He cups his hands around his mouth, and when they come away, a crumpled black feather rests in his cupped palms.

Taako’s eyes snap open, and he sits up.

There’s a wild and sleep-drunk moment where he doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know how he got there, and with a slightly disoriented cry he fumbles for his knife — but his knife’s gone, and his fingers plumb an empty sheath, heart racing and hands fumbling, and he’s alone, and defenseless, and  _where is his fucking knife_ —

He blinks, and the fear recedes. The black haze clears from the corner of his vision. It’s then that he notices the maid staring at him from across the room, her arms preoccupied in hauling back the drapes. Her jaw is slightly agape.

Magic surges through his fist, jittery and instinctive. He closes his hand and holds it until his nails bite his palm. The energy recedes. He counts up and down from twenty until he trusts himself to speak.

She’ll never know how close she came to getting acquainted with five levels of Magic Missile.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he demands belligerently. His tongue is clumsy from sleep, and it comes out blearier than he would like.

The maid flinches, and then dips into a quick curtsy. “Airing the room, my lord. I brought—”

“Who asked you? It’s a big room, it doesn’t need airing. Get the fuck out.”

She flinches again, and with an obedient nod, she races out.

Taako rakes his hand through his hair, blowing out a long breath in an attempt to calm the skittering pulse of adrenaline still working its way through his bloodstream. It doesn’t work, so he rolls off the bed and stalks to the window.

The storm’s painted the world in monochrome. The courtyard below his window wears a carpet of white thick enough that the footsteps crossing it drive a foot deep into the snow, and icicles the size of daggers hang from the eaves. Dark clouds march with the occasional ominous mutter across the sky. They leave between their ranks not a single sliver of blue. Gusts of snow flit and thrash past the window, swirling in the arms of a plaintive, whining wind.

Across the city, clouds have wreathed the mountains and hidden them completely from view. Taako shudders.

Belatedly, he notices a new fire crackling in the grate. Some fresh kindling sits aside it, tied up neatly in paper and string. The room’s warmer than it was, though he’s still got some kind of chill clinging to his extremities. Whether it’s the aftermath of a long night in a cold room or the dream he doesn’t care to consider.

Whatever it is, it’s compounding the layer of scum and general discomfort that comes with travel, and it’s getting to be intolerable, so he pokes around until he finds a door leading off to the adjacent room.

The bathroom is an enclosed stone chamber with a deep bath carved into the rocks at its aft and a small latrine at the fore. A row of small pottery jars sit along the lip of the bath, and a stack of fresh towels sits mounted on a stool to its side. Strange levers jut from the walls beside it. Taako, eyeing up the whole apparatus with all due wariness, gives one a cautious tug.

A burbling noise comes from the rock, and then water spills from a pipe near the top. It tumbles into the basin and rapidly begins to fill the bathtub. Stem rises from the growing pool, and when Taako dips his fingers into the water it’s searing hot to the touch.

He damn near trips over his own feet trying to shuck his clothes.

When he sinks into the water it’s balm, it’s blessed, it’s better than spiced wine on summer nights and every last prayer he ever halfheartedly muttered in Istus’ direction. It’s liquid sunshine. The heat sinks through his bones and weeps down to his toes in thick, honeyed ropes, as if there’s caramelized sugar running through his veins, as if he’s dead and gone to whatever heaven awaits serially heretical half-atheists who blaspheme like it’s going out of style, and when he draws lungfuls of steam the warmth rushes in through his lungs.

He’s never coming out. They will have to pry him naked out of this bath with a lever and rope, and he’ll fight tooth and nail for every inch.

He reaches for one of the ceramic jars at random, and when he pours a measure of its contents into the bath it releases a strong scent of lemon and eucalyptus. Through experimentation, he figures out that the rest of them are scented soaps, some of which foam and bubble when he brings them into the water and some of which tingle pleasantly against the skin. Upon contact, layers of grit and grime start peeling off his skin and dissolve in the water. It’s supremely yuck. He rubs most of himself raw from it, until his skin is back to a flushed, healthy golden brown, and then he rinses out his hair, working soap into the yellow roots and drawing it down to the silvery strands near the ends.

Lup used to wash his hair, back when they were tykes. He’d washed hers, too, seeing as they didn’t have no bath nor coin to buy one with, and so had made do with a bucket of water and some lye. Rough stuff, lye, since they’d had to nick it from restaurant kitchens. Always left their hair dry-limp and frizzy, but clean was clean, back then. Lup always tugged too hard and then bitched him out for complaining about it. He misses her like a severed limb.

Once the bathwater cools to lukewarm, he reluctantly crawls out. He mummifies himself in thick towels and braves the relative chill of the bedroom, which still fails to be anything less than miserable after the delicious warmth of the bath. In the bureau there’s a few sets of simple plainclothes, all sized loose for maximal adaptability, nothing too spectacular. Taako finds a high-collared coat of eggshell white at the back of the closet, lined with some kind of soft brown fur. It wouldn’t be his first choice for himself, but it’s the one thing in the assortment that isn’t black, grey, or beige, so it’ll have to do. 

The only other spot of color in the wardrobe is a pale blue scarf. Honestly, the people here live like monks.

He settles it carefully around his neck and goes to hunt down some breakfast.

The long, empty halls of the castle are eerie in the dark, full of chittering echoes and shadows that twist in the periphery. In the daylight, however, they’re more of an annoyance than anything else. Taako paces a complete circuit around the floor before he stumbles upon a staircase, and even then, he spends twenty minutes hunting down a scullery maid to tell him where the kitchen is. By the time he arrives at the kitchen doors, he is out of breath, warm in the face, and peevishly hungry.

The head cook is a severe-looking dragonborn with a chipped tooth, but she smiles wide and welcoming when Taako asks where the flour is. Chances are she doesn’t figure him for a lord or a knight like the other servants do, because she doesn’t dip or bow when he slips into the room, but that’s fair enough, seeing as a lord wouldn’t have much occasion to find himself in the kitchen. Might also be that she doesn’t care. Taako knows from experience that in the kitchen, one pair of hands is as good as another. 

The kitchen is light, airy, and huge, with enough room for more than twice the number of kitchen maids currently occupying it to work comfortably. She points him in the direction of the pans and the pantry and then lets him well enough alone, which suits Taako more than fine. He digs out a cast-iron skillet and helps himself to a few scoops from the flour and sugar barrels. When he snags an errant kitchen maid by the sleeve and asks her if they’ve got any apples, she blinks.

“Fresh or dried?”

And that knocks him for a loop that he’s not soon to recover from, the idea of cooking with fruit that’s  _fresh_ , and not bottom-of-the-barrel produce or dried within an inch of its life. She points him in the direction of the produce boxes and he picks out a few red ones — flawless, round and rich and not a brown splotch or soft spot to be found — and hoards them jealously until he gets back to his station, hiding them in his pockets.

The other kitchen maids give him weird looks, for this. He glowers at them until they balk and scamper off. 

Once he’s cooking it’s easier to forget those anxieties. Flour, eggs, and milk go into a pan together, and he whisks them with a vengeance that invites wary glances from those around him. Once it’s light enough to bubble at the edges, he pours it in slim discs over the heated stove, flipping them once the edges of each pastry crisp and turn gold.

He dices some of the apples and tosses them on another pan with some brown sugar and butter. It’s a poor man’s sauté, designed to soften them up, but it also serves to bleed out the moisture, which in turn concentrates the natural sugars. The butter binds with the brown sugar and clings to the apples after they come out of the pan. Taako pops one into his mouth and is pleased to find that it’s more candy than fruit, which is the point, of course. Breakfast, as Taako once informed Lup, is best taken as an opportunity to eat dessert first thing in the morning.

The pastries come off the grill warm and chewy. He wraps each around a dollop of caramelized apples and some whipped cream, folding them over and arranging them carefully on a plate. 

There’s something soothing about cooking. It really is just alchemy, when it comes down to it, albeit a more mundane alchemy than most are acquainted with. And Taako is an excellent alchemist.

He takes his plate out of the kitchen with him. Amidst the bustle of activity, nobody notices its loss.

He’s not sure what he wants except a place to eat that isn’t full of other people. Quiet, maybe. Distance. He wants peace. Wants to be alone, except not really, he wants to be alone in the way that he is when he’s with Lup, when everything’s quiet except for the buzz of his thoughts and the slow tide of her breath, coming in and out with reassuring stability, telling him she’s alive and so is he.

Did she have pastries for breakfast this morning? Coffee? Maybe bacon from the tavern, those charred slices they cut so thin they burn on the grill, and scrambled eggs mushy from a scarcity of time on the stove and an excess of milk. A shitty breakfast, but what can you expect? Taako’s not at the grill, couldn’t be. Would be, if he could, if they had the money for a kitchen of their own.

Or maybe she got some coffee and a doughnut at a street-side vendor, because she’s competent enough to rustle up a breakfast for herself that isn’t fried shit on a platter, and Taako is being a narcissistic shithead. He takes a sulky bite of pastry at the thought. 

It’s not hard to acknowledge, however reluctantly, that Lup may deal with distance better than him. She worries less, for one thing. Doesn’t count nights spent apart, definitely doesn’t fret over what he’s getting for breakfast. Not to say she doesn’t care, of course, but it’s rational, merited worry. She was in the world for a whole eighteen seconds before he was. Probably learned how to deal with separation anxiety then.

He finishes the rest of the pastry curled up in one of the castle’s enormous windowsills. It overlooks the grounds, where the trees bend low to the ground under the weight of snow. Lacy prongs of frost curl in over the window’s edges.

Over the mountains is home. He pretends that if he squints, he can see the shape of Neverwinter pressing through the clouds.

His thoughts drift towards John, and he cringes. He’ll have to return the down payment, probably. Will he be pissed? He seems like the kind of guy who’d get pissed. Taako will have to find out a way to deal with that whole situation, once he’s home.

Still, if he’s honest with himself, he prefers this outcome to the other. The prince seems like a nice person. Good princes are hard to come by. It’d be a shame if he were dead.

Voices echo from down the hall. Taako sits up straighter, ears flicking up.

Two courtiers come into view at the end of the hall. One is tall, with a beak-like nose and dark hair woven into a long braid down her back, while the other is shorter, darker, and has her auburn hair woven into a tight bun at the back of her neck. The redhead’s arms are corded thick with muscle, while her tall companion is all limbs like a willow tree, gangling and thin. Both wear the prince’s colors, fine black suits and armored slit skirts. They’re laughing together at something.

Taako contemplates making a stealthy escape to avoid the hassle of dealing with nobles, but they notice him before anything can come of it.

“Hail and well met, stranger,” calls the taller one, perking up. “You’re an unfamiliar face.”

He nods and waves, a short toss of his hand, in the hopes that’ll be the end of it. No such luck. The courtiers come to a halt in front of him, sporting twin grins.

“You must be the guy that washed in last night,” says the shorter. Her voice is friendly, if gruff. “We’d been wondering who you were. It’s not often the prince gets guests.”

“Yeah, well. I didn’t come in until late.”

“I’m Sloane,” says the dark-haired cheerfully. “This is Hurley. Ministers of War and Laws, respectively. Who are you?”

“Sloane,” chides Hurley.

“It’s a legitimate question.”

“I’m Taako,” Taako says, and when they wait for his title, he offers: “I’m a guest of the prince.”

“A special guest?”

_“Sloane.”_

He doesn’t know exactly what the implication was, but he gathers that it was one part insult to two parts lascivious intent. Sloane, however, schools herself innocent. “We missed you at breakfast,” she prompts, and Taako doesn’t trust the implicit suggestion.

“We assumed you were tired from the journey,” Hurley supplies helpfully.

“Or from something else.”

“Sloane!”

Taako chokes. “Uh, nah, it’s not like—”

“She knows that,” Hurley sighs. “She’s well aware, actually — I’m sorry, we’re being rude. Let’s start over. Hi, Taako. I’m Hurley, and this is Lady Sloane of Goldcliff, who I promise is usually better behaved.”

“You don’t have to lie to him,” Sloane says fondly, and hangs her arm around Hurley’s shoulders. To Taako, she adds, “This is Lady Hurley of Goldcliff. She’s my wife.”

Taako says, “So you work for Kravitz?”

Their eyebrows arch sharply in simultaneous and identical curves. “We work for the realm,” says Hurley, eliciting a snort and an eye roll from Sloane. “But we serve at the pleasure of  _Prince_ Kravitz, yes.” She coats her words with a glossy veneer of indifference that does nothing at all to hide her intrigue.

He realizes his slip-up too late to fix it. Of course everyone smothers on titles and honorifics, here.

“What does the Minister of War even do, in the Winterlands?” he asks Sloane, trying to brush off the gaffe. “Haven’t you guys been peaceful for like, a thousand years?”

“And who do you think’s responsible for that? Pixies?” Sloane tips up her chin, a little defiant and a lot smug. “Anyway, there’s still internal conflicts. I deal with uprisings, rebellions. Anything that needs a sword and some doing.”

“Huh.”

“You said ‘you guys,’” Hurley remarks suddenly. “When you were talking about the Winterlands. You’re not from here?”

He winces. “Nah,” he says carefully. “Cha’boy’s from out of town. Thought I’d come and see the sights.” 

“Which parts?” Hurley inquires.

“Um. Southerly.”

“Mirabar?”

“Anauroch?”

He doesn’t know what that is. His awareness of Winterlands geography begins and ends with the Spine. “Over the mountains,” he says vaguely. “Came north from the Spine, got stuck here until the pass clears.”

“You’re Faeruni?” Sloane straightens up, attentive.

He shrugs.

“We don’t get many Faeruni diplomats,” Hurley muses. “The last one would’ve been . . . what, fifty years back?”

“Sixty, maybe. That funny guy with the big hat. Hated the cold.”

“Right! He kept asking Prince Kravitz about trading opportunities. Annoying kid.”

“Didn’t like him,” Sloane agrees. She returns her attention to Taako. “What d’you think of your king?”

Taako’s brain goes blank. It takes him a full five seconds to figure out who she means, and even then, there’s a dizzying moment where he can’t remember the bastard’s name. “Um. You mean Artemis?”

“He’s on first name basis with his king, too,” Hurley marvels to Sloane. “Crow’s claws, kid, where’d you get your connections?”

“You know, I . . . just happen to be a very important person.”

“No shit?”

“No, yeah, of course. A very important one. Who does . . . classified things. Top secret, highly confidential. Couldn’t tell you if I wanted to, but you know, highly important to the safety of the kingdom.”

“Oh,” Hurley says. “Like a spymaster?”

“Yes. Exactly. Except even more secret.”

“So like a spy,” says Sloane. Her eyes narrow slightly.

On second thought. “. . . No.”

“Sure sounds like it.”

Hurley tosses her a glance that reeks of unimpressed. “Yeah, Sloane. Because, you know, all real spies will tell you they’re spies, if you ask them.”

A knot begins to unwind in Taako’s stomach. “Yeah,” he says fiercely, pointing at Hurley, “yeah, right. Precisely.”

“Just saying, if it walks like a duck . . .”

“I don’t think Taako walks like a duck,” Hurley says shrewdly. “And ‘classified’ doesn’t mean ‘subterfuge.’”

“Not always.”

“Well, be sure to mind your state secrets around him, then,” she says wearily. “Personally, I can think of greater threats to the Winterlands than a scrawny Faeruni elf and whatever his information-gathering capabilities may be. No offense, Taako.”

“Some still taken.”

Sloane smirks. “All right, then,” she says. “If you say so. I guess I’ll keep him off the thumbscrews for now.”

“Sorry,” Taako pipes up, high-pitched, “were the thumbscrews an option? At any point? Were those on the table?”

“No,” Hurley says sternly, at the same time Sloane says, “Wouldn’t you like to know,” with more levity than Taako feels is really deserved, considering the subject at hand.

“Sloane and I,” she says, threading her arm through her wife’s as though gripping a rudder, “are going to go do our jobs. Welcome to Shadowfell, Taako. Hope you enjoy your stay.”

“. . . Thank you?”

Sloane huffs and sticks out her hand to Taako. He tentatively clasps it at the wrist, which seems to be the right thing, because she shakes it twice and lets go.

“You should come riding with us sometime,” Hurley says brightly. “We’ll show you around. The Winterlands’ shadowmounts are the fastest in the world.”

“Your what?” Taako’s never heard of whatever that is, and isn’t too set on learning, what with Sloane still leering as though she’s a prize huntress he’s a particularly interesting piece of venison.

“Shadowmounts,” she repeats. “We breed them in Goldcliff. You won’t find a finer beast this side of the astral plane. Don’t worry, though, they’re perfectly safe.”

“Again with the lying,” Sloane remarks, affectionately indignant. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Well, I mean—”

“They’re mean beasts,” Sloane tells Taako bluntly. “Mean and high-spirited, and they’ll buck you as soon as look at you. Touch them wrong and they’ll take your hand off. But they’re fun to ride, so you still should come out with us sometime.”

“If it’s that or thumbscrews,” Taako says weakly, and she surprises him by letting out a rowdy laugh.

“I like him,” she tells Hurley. “I can see why the Prince kept him around.”

From the way Hurley huffs and flashes her a chiding look, Taako suspects it might not be a compliment. Nevertheless, he shakes hands with Hurley and tamps down the tide of general unease swilling in his navel. They don’t talk like nobles, don’t walk like it, don’t overindulge in crests or titles in the way he’s nobles of their rank can afford to, and yet nevertheless, the fact of what they are settles on their shoulders like a mantle of stone. It’s in the unbowed arch of their spines and the high, daring set of their jaws, as if nobody ever told them  _no_ before, as if they never learned what it meant to kneel. They’re born aristocrats, and members of the prince’s cabinet, to boot. No one ever taught them to be small.

Taako bristles without meaning to, has to concentrate on flattening out the instinctive curl of his lip and the defensive hunch in his spine. “Nice getting to know you,” he says, making a halfhearted stab at sincerity. “Ta-ta, and toodles, and all that. Thanks for the invite. Drop by again.”

If they catch the disingenuousness — and they almost certainly do, they’re peerage, reading veiled social cues is basically their job — they don’t remark on it. Hurley dips a short nod, and Sloane copies it. They shuffle their heels in the way that means they’re about to leave but they’re waiting for a proper goodbye, and he takes it he’s supposed to bow, now, given their rank and his, but Taako doesn’t give a rat’s ass, so he jerks his head in acknowledgement and turns his head while they walk off, their heels clicking crisply against the floor.

Lup once said that if some people have chips on their shoulders, then Taako’s got a whole fucking timber plank. Which is fair enough. But it should be observed, in his opinion, that he wasn't the one who put it there.

 

* * *

 

For a place the size of a small village, the castle offers surprisingly little to do. Taako wanders around for the better part of the day mapping all the main hallways and stairwells, tracking down which passages lead where and what doorways point him in which direction. Some servants oblige him from time to time with directions, although he swears a few of them point him wrong for personal amusement, because more than once he ends up in a supply closet when he’s looking for a bathroom and has to backtrack all the way to the kitchens and start over. It’s an experience both enlightening and infuriating in equal measure. There’s nothing to take the shine off the concept of living in a castle like having to walk thirty minutes to take a piss. 

By afternoon the storm’s still seething strong and he’s more or less figured how to get from his room to the entrance hall without losing his way, which is a damn fine accomplishment as far as he’s concerned.

Courtiers flock the place like rats in a granary. He can’t turn a corner without running into a gaggle of high-collared assholes in fine leathers chattering seriously about nothing, nasal accepts bouncing around the vaulted ceilings, and he sporadically has to duck into alcoves and behind tapestries to avoid them. More than once he gets stuck behind a suit of armor while a knot of them gab about court melodrama less than three feet from his face. The frustration of it all gives him half a mind to henceforth navigate the place by way of the vents.

It’s in this way that he ends up stumbling haphazardly through a door on the western side of the building and finds himself in the library. Like the rest of the castle, it’s a gorgeous room, with high stained glass windows that strain the sunlight through in blue-green rivers, and two-story bookshelves stacked with multicolored leather volumes. Dust rotates in high spiraling clusters over the tables. It smells of paper and leather and smoky wood.

Sitting alone at a table in the middle of it is the prince.

He is, devastatingly enough, even more attractive in daylight. Bent over a sprawl of papers that have colonized the desk like a crawling fungus, he is absorbed in some scourge of tiny print and fancy lettering, and it draws his face into a solemn, absent focus. The prince relaxed is a different man. Ease declares itself in the lax tendons of his jaw, parted infinitesimally, and the lowered planes of his shoulders. In the idle tap of his fingers against the table there is a simple contentment.

The door falls shut behind Taako with a humiliating clamor. Kravitz looks up, his ease falling away like a shrugged cloak, and it stings Taako with incomprehensible guilt.

“Taako,” he says, shuffling his surprise away behind a lacquer of polite wariness. “Hello, there.”

“Erm. Hi.”

Kravitz waits for a respectable amount of time before prompting, “Can I help you?”

Between the judicious arch of his eyebrow and the open book in his arms, he comes across as the world’s best-dressed librarian. Taako is very begrudgingly charmed.

“No. I mean, I wasn’t looking for you. I didn’t mean to disturb you, or whatever.” He flaps a hand at the doors. “Found the place by accident, actually. Took a wrong left at the throne room, wound up here. Weird! Anyway. Don’t mind me. Didn’t meant to interrupt your reading, or what have you.”

He is the smoothest motherfucker alive.

“. . . Sure,” Kravitz says tactfully. He returns to his book, culling the conversation with a blunt and effective mercy kill. 

Insensibly, Taako regrets it.

For one thing, it leaves him with nothing to do but diddle his thumbs and stand around like an asshole. The titles on the nearest shelves are all long and insufferably dull. They sport such gems as  _An Agricultural Account of the Winterlands Sum Exports Between Years CXIV and XLVII_ and  _ABrief History of Teutonic Shifts in Northern Brumal Geological Formations_ , both of which Taako would rather lose a couple teeth than crack open on pain of death. He slots one out at random anyway, pretends to flip through it.

The spine creaks at the imposition, a sound that ricochets with harrowing volume throughout the chamber. He bites down hard on his lip and waits for it to fade before risking the first page, which immediately rustles as though it’s made of goddamn wind chimes, and the binding snaps with a bombast unmatched by canon fire and by the fucking Colors he doesn’t remember books being this loud.

Kravitz clears his throat quietly. Taako straightens up and shoots him a quick look out the edge of his eye, but the prince hasn’t moved, hasn’t even lifted his eyes from the thrice-blessed book he’s absorbed in. 

Taako snaps his book shut, experimentally. In the silent room, the resultant  _THUD_ deafens. It bounces with annoying longevity around the vaulted walls. The prince doesn’t stir.

He wedges it back onto the shelf, rattling the chained volumes beside it, and drums his fingers on the wood frame. The wood obligingly rattles back. Whistling a high-spirited tune that scrapes the upper bounds of his pitch, he drags his hand down the row of spines, occasionally pausing to yank on the chains binding them to the shelf.

Kravitz’s cheek twitches. Taako smirks.

He gets all the way to the end of the row and then plucks out another tome at random. He braces his thumb on the pages and runs through them like a flip-book, the ancient vellum crackling and grinding against itself under the strain. When he reaches the end, Taako closes the book, lifts it up in both hands, and drops it on the floor.

It lands with an ungracious  _thwump_ on the stone. Kravitz takes a deep, sharp breath and looks up.

Taako smiles at him toothily.

“Can I help you?” Kravitz repeats, slowly, with palpable strain.

Taako shrugs and lounges over to the table, where he drapes himself over the empty chair. “Whatcha reading?”

Kravitz watches him prowl closer with an incredulous kind of stillness. Not a muscle moves except his eyes. He disdains to utter, “‘A Completed History of the Silver Wars,’ By Llewelyn Prewett.”

“Sounds like a snooze,” says Taako. “What’s it about?”

“The Silver Wars,” says Kravitz matter-of-factly, and before Taako can rag on him for that shiner of an observation, he adds, “A series of civil wars in Faerun. They would’ve been before your time.”

In retrospect, Taako might’ve been a little quicker on the recall about that, seeing as the name does ring a distant bell, but he’s always been bored stiff by history and it’s not like anybody ever bothered to sit him down and learn him the business of old dead dudes. Lup had a taste for it, but she also had the willpower to suffer through the bloated boring bits of it, like tax accounts and diplomatic treatises, the patience for which he gratefully lacked. Only lessons Taako ever figured worth keeping came from the school of hard knocks.

“What’s so interesting about them?” He flops into the chair without asking.

“They’re, er. Very bloody.” Kravitz taps the page to indicate. “It destroyed the domestic economy.”

“Huh.” 

“It’s interesting, actually. You see, there’s a lot of battlegrounds in the southeast of Faerun that weren’t arable for years after the wars ended, because the sheer amount of blood shed there disrupted the pH of the soil—”

Taako yawns. “Incredible,” he says. “How do you make a war boring?”

Kravitz cuts himself off, nonplussed. “It’s not boring,” he says. “It was a pretty major problem for most of the nation, after — and anyway, you asked.”

“I’m just saying. You’re talking about a war. There’s  _gotta_ be more important things to discuss than soil acidity.”

“You’d be surprised how much of governance is worrying about the mundane,” Kravitz quips, thin-lipped. “It may not be the most dramatic subject matter, but—” 

“Is this what you do for fun? Read about pH balances?” Taako waves disbelievingly to the book. “Tell me it isn’t. Because if it is, I’m sorry, but that’s kind of the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Not to encourage you to pass judgment on how I spend my time,” Kravitz says, slightly peevish, “but no, this isn’t for personal pleasure. It’s for work.”

Taako hums thoughtfully. “Is that what all of this is?” He indicates the table.

“Yes.”

“How much work do you have? On a daily basis, I mean.”

“Well, I run a kingdom, so.”

“That’s a lot, I’m guessing?”

“It keeps me busy.”

“What do you do for fun?”

Kravitz swings the book shut, pushing it away, and leans back in his chair to survey Taako. A long, rigid line of a tendon stands out in his neck. His lips press into a perfect moue of moderated frustration.

Taako offers his most endearing grin.

The prince exhales. It snaps the tension clean in two.

“Read,” he says, tossing out the word with a resignation that signals surrender. “I read for fun.”

“That’s it? Reading?”

“Mm-hm.”

“But that’s also what you do for work.”

“Aptly noted.”

“So you just sit around and read all day?”

“I also answer questions.”

Taako makes a throaty sound of disgust. “You have  _got_ to get yourself a hobby, pal.”

“I’ll take that under consideration, thank you.”

“What’s the point of being royalty,” Taako demands, feeling sincerely injured on Kravitz’s behalf, “if you’re stuck doing boring shit all day?”

“It’s not all boring,” he says, a little indignantly.

Taako snatches up the book Kravitz was reading, ignoring Kravitz’s exclamation of dismay and abortive attempt to rescue it. “Yeah, uh, okay, uh, let’s see: ‘Cation-exchange capacity is the total amount of extractable bases that can be held by the soil, expressed in terms of milliequivalents per 100 grams of soil at neutrality—’ hey,  _sire?_ I want to gargle arsenic just listening to this.”

Kravitz reaches out sharply, as if to steal the book back, but stops and reluctantly withdraws his hand partially through the motion, perhaps realizing how uncivil it would be. Taako warily lifts it out of reach as a precautionary measure, anyway. “Give it back,” he says.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nope. I’m quarantining it. This shit is bad for your health.”

“Taako, I’m telling you to give it back.” His voice drops into a register deep enough to scare statues into shuffling out of the way.

“And I’m telling you that this garbo will give you a terminal case of boring,” drawls Taako, because apparently both his fear and common sense are heavily outmatched by his basic inability to Give Things a Rest. “Seriously. Take a break or something. Go fishing. Live a little.”

“Go fishing,” Kravitz repeats, having leapfrogged past anger and landed squarely in bewilderment.

“No? Don’t like fishing? How about hunting? Or gardening, gardening’s cool. Lot of space for it.”

“I don’t hunt,” he says. “And gardens don’t . . . do terribly well, here. The soil doesn’t—”

“We’re not going back to talking about fucking soil,” Taako announces with a vengeance. “Let’s get that one straight. We are on a twenty-four hour soil moratorium, effective now. Try again.”

“You are a baffling individual,” Kravitz says, and it shakes with what Taako at first mistakes for fury, before he notices the slight tremor in Kravitz’s shoulders and realizes it’s repressed laughter. “Has anyone ever told you that? Thoroughly vexing. I’d commend you if I wasn’t worried you’d take it as encouragement—”

“I’m baffling? Me? I’m not the one who sits around reading about soil balances for shits and giggles, friendo.” Taako slings his legs up comfortably on the table, grins when Kravitz doesn’t so much as chide him.

“That’s,” the prince says, voice still quivering under the weight of his composure, “that’s — you know what, that’s fair, I’ll give you that one. That one’s free. But you, you’re a special kind of confounding.”

“Aw, stop. You’re making me blush.”

“You pulled a knife on me eighteen hours ago—”

His amusement sours. “What, are we still on that?”

“—and then  _apologized_ , spent the night, disappeared for seven hours, and then came in here to — what, tease me about my reading habits? I’m still not sure—”

“If you’re talking about missing breakfast, I didn’t know that was an official thing, so that one’s not on me.”

“Is this normal behavior for you? Is there something you want?” He spreads his hands, palms-up in the universal symbol for helpless. “Because I’m sorry, but there’s something getting lost in translation.”

“I don’t want anything,” Taako says, stung. “I mean, I just wanted to hang, I guess. Jeez, dude, what’s  _your_ damage?”

It cuts him off like a severed windpipe. He closes his mouth, stares at Taako as though he’d declared himself High King of Faerun, and blinks several times. Opens his mouth, and then closes it again. The hard-faced Prince of the Winterlands is subsumed behind the numb astonishment of a man evidently hearing something for the first time in his life.

“I don’t think I understand,” he says faintly.

There must be something about nerds that gives them skulls of solid platinum. Taako despairs. “What, am I speaking infernal or something? I want to hang out. Mingle. Fraternize.  _I crave your company, sire_ . Is any of this registering, or . . . ?”

Comprehension dawns slow and weak as a winter’s morning on Kravitz’s face, reassuring Taako that he is not, in fact, speaking in tongues, though the prince could still stand to stop looking like Taako beaned him upside the head with his own goddamn scythe. It’s not like he asked the man to elope. “All right,” he says carefully. “I — I suppose we can . . . talk.”

“Thanks ever so, milord.” Taako rolls his eyes.

“I’m going to call for some tea,” Kravitz announces, apropos of nothing. “And for someone to clear the rest of this away. Do you intend on holding my book hostage for the rest of the day, or may I have it back now?”

Taako pulls the book further out of his reach.

“Collateral it is, then,” sighs Kravitz. “I thought so.”

 

* * *

 

Tea is a buttery yellow brew with flecks of something green speckled throughout, like emerald ore in topaz, and it sighs little twists of fragrant steam into the air over the table. The pot comes with a selection of brown and white sugar cubes, lemon, honey, and a tiny porcelain pitcher of cream, each in their own little dish. It’s thoroughly pretentious and entirely fun; Taako enjoys it immensely. Kravitz takes his with a delicate squeeze of lemon and a single bead of honey, whereas Taako loads as many sugar cubes into his own cup as possible before the tea laps up against the brim and spills onto the saucer.

Then he sits back and talks. Kravitz listens more than he speaks, which is fine by Taako, because it gives him license to go on about whatever the hell he wants. The prince seems more at ease in contemplative silence than spirited conversation, content to stir his tea and offer the occasional prompting question or supplementary remark. He demonstrates genuine interest in whatever trivial shit Taako’s chosen to complain about, and he seems entertained by stories of gutter life and back-road adventure and in a way that an aristocrat shouldn’t. Talking to him is  _nice_ . It’s comfortable. Taako can’t remember the last time he had a conversation this easy with anyone but Lup.

“—so I have an arm around the guy’s neck, right, and the other’s holding on for dear life to the edge of the roof, and at this point I’m pretty sure he’s choking, given the way he’s squirming, but it’s not like I’m in a position to do anything about it, so I’ve gotta convince this idiot to stop  _moving_ before he sends us both plummeting four stories into what’s quickly becoming a riot. While I’m hanging there! I’m yelling, he’s yelling, the crowd’s so loud I can’t hear shit, my hand is starting to fall asleep, and then out of the blue: bam! Lup sticks her head over the edge of the roof. And before I can, I don’t know, weep for joy and thank Istus or anything, she gives me this look and yells, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ As if I’m just hanging out there for shits and giggles! And I say, ‘Gee, Lup, I don’t know! Sorry! Let me climb up there real quick and apologize for wasting your time, since I clearly have such a say in the matter!’”

Kravitz smiles around the rim of his cup. Taako pauses, catching his breath.

“Worst part is,” he continues, conversationally, “the bastard got away in the end, so we didn’t even get the bounty. I got a lifetime ban from the city and sprained two muscles in my arm for nothing.”

Kravitz says, “Did anyone ever catch him?”

“Dunno. He was slimy, but Lup and I weren’t the toughest customers on the block back then, either, so it’s not like someone better couldn’t have come along and nabbed him. Bounty like that, it’s just a matter of time.”

The prince reaches for the teapot and refills his cup. His air renders this one mundane act unaccountably graceful. “You’ve mentioned this woman, Lup, a few times,” he says. “Is she your partner?”

“Oh,” Taako says, surprised despite himself, because although it makes sense that he wouldn’t know who she was he’s never thought of the need to introduce her before. He could count on one hand the number of people in the world who know him and not her. “No, I mean — yeah, but she’s my sister.”

“Ah. Older or younger?”

“Twin. Older, technically.”

Kravitz nods. “She seems nice,” he offers.

Taako snorts. At Kravitz’s inquiring look, he says, “Does she? Honestly?”

A rueful twist to his mouth is his only admission. “At the least, she seems . . . suited to you.”

“Well, chyeah. She’s been with yours truly our whole life. Puts up with my shit, and vice versa. Knows me better than anyone, Lup does.” He breaks off because any more honesty would be overwhelming, and because he can’t explain, there aren’t the words; things like  _bond_ and  _important_ don’t begin to touch her, don’t do her one whit of justice at all. “Anyway, she’s my family, and I’m hers. Always been that way, always will be.”

“You’re lucky to have someone like that,” Kravitz says, not jealous, just matter-of-fact.

Taako hums, deflecting. It’s not like he doesn’t  _know._ Hell, it’s hard to miss all your life’s luck getting used up in one person, but it’s still a little much to hear.

“How about you, feathers?” He clears his throat. “What’s your family like?”

“Dead,” Kravitz says, still matter-of-fact, and before Taako can splutter and apologize he adds, “My mother was Princess of the Winterlands for several centuries before me. She only had the one child. My father . . . I think he was the Lord of Sky’s End, before he married her, but I’d have to pull out the genealogies. He died a very long time ago, you see . . . and then my maternal grandmother, I remember I met her once. She abdicated, my mother inherited early. It was a real scandal.”

Taako scoffs with more chide than ire. “That’s a genealogy,” he says. “What were they  _like_ , genius? Funny? Nice? Your mom, tell me about her. Was she a square, too?”

“No,” Kravitz says wistfully. His eyes slide leewards and suddenly he’s not here, he’s miles away and a thousand years shy of where they are, watching someone else. “She was clever. Not shy. A very good entertainer, everyone liked her. It’s rare enough for anyone to like you, for a monarch, but she was . . . exceptional.”

Taako shifts. “Sounds like a party.”

“She was. She liked making people happy, that was her joy. She’d throw these enormous events for holidays, birthdays, any occasion, and everyone would come . . . it lit up the place. You’d never seen Shadowfell so bright, lanterns everywhere, every room lit, every hallway glowing. It washed out the stars. 

“And she sang. They used to say she could sing down the crows from the trees and the turrets, make them sit and listen to her. You should’ve seen it, it was—” The word he’s seeking fails him, flits out of reach, and the illusion breaks. He retreats into himself with the slow dimming of a candle expiring. “She cast a long shadow,” he says quietly, and hides his mouth behind the rim of his cup.

Taako fidgets with a sugar cube. The grains rub off on his thumb, clinging to the skin the more he worries at it. “Sorry,” he says.

“She’s been dead a long time,” Kravitz says, and it’s almost nonchalant. “She’s serving at the Queen’s side, now.”

Snow lashes at the window. It comes in tides, the storm does, sheets of white rage surging and swelling and cresting against the walls with terrible howls, and then receding into the air with whimpering retreats. If nothing else this can be said for it: it fills the silence. Its chatter sustains the peace. When the conversation staggers and falls short, the storm scurries up to patch the gaps, offering a reprieve from the terrible quiet.

“The Queen,” Taako declares, lunging clumsily for the subject change. Kravitz gives a passing imitation of a startled deer. “Let’s talk about that. Is she actually, you know . . . ?”

Drifting back to himself, Kravitz sends him an undeservedly arch look. “Are you asking me if she’s real, Taako? I didn’t take you for the theological type.”

“No, but I mean . . . how is she involved, here, exactly?” Taako waggles his fingers. “Is the whole Winterlands holy ground for her, or something? Because that’s a fuckin’ he-yuge piece of land to bless, I mean, clerics must have been clocking overtime on that one for a few millennia.”

“Ah.” Kravitz sets down his cup. He accepts the subject change as gracefully as he is able, which is to say, making a neat catch of a badly thrown peace offering. “Yes and no. It’s under her protection, but it’s not holy land. I perform certain duties in her service, and she sustains the Winterlands as her territory.”

“Certain duties,” Taako repeats skeptically. “Like what? Keeping the ghosts in order?”

“Yes,” Kravitz says, unblinking.

Taako splutters.

“Among other things,” Kravitz admits. “The Prince of the Winterlands — or Princess, whichever; we don’t have kings or queens — is entrusted to maintain the balance between the realms of life and death.”

“With all due respect to your religion, my man? That means nothing to me. What do you actually do?”

Taako’s heinous atheism doesn’t seem to much bother Kravitz. He even smiles, albeit one of those meager tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I enforce the law of life and death,” he says. “I guard the Eternal Stockade. I punish those who fail to follow the edict of the Raven Queen, and escape the Astral Plane. I try to preserve of the sanctity of death against those who would violate it.”

“Necromancers,” Taako guesses. He’s rewarded with another little smile and a nod.

“Yes. Liches, reanimations, possessions. That kind of thing.”

Taako leans forward rests his chin in his palm, intrigued despite himself. “What’s your verdict on resurrections?”

“They’re messy,” Kravitz says unhappily. “It all depends on how long after death they’re performed, how far through the process of dying the person is at the time . . . who their god is, if they have a god, if the resurrection is being performed consensually, whether it’s a point-blank resurrection or if there are strings attached — you see, it’s complicated. And naturally, everyone wants a chance to appeal their case before the Raven Queen, but I’ve got to decide whether or not to give the audience, because it’s not as though every Tom, Dick, and Hragathor can waltz up to the Eternal Fortress, is it?”

“Mm-hm.”

“And don’t get me started on the paperwork.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you have any idea how frustrating it is, trying to keep ledgers for the dead? Trying to get  _head counts?_ It’s impossible. A ludicrous amount of my time is spent trying to perform basic feats of accounting. It’s that difficult.”

“It’s just unreasonable,” Taako agrees.

The prince drums his fingers with a restless rhythm on the table. “It’s an important job,” he relents. “And I do like it. At the end of the day, I think I’m decently good at it. But it can be frustrating, you know? Like any job.”

“You get vacation time? Ever thought about taking a month off?” Taako folds his arms.

He chuckles. “Yes, let me just float that one to Raven Queen. I’m sure the necromancers of the world would be kind enough to stop their nefarious bidding for a month so that I can take some time for myself.”

“Okay one: you did not just say ‘nefarious bidding’ out loud as though you’re a campy cleric trying to banish their first infernal. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth. Two, get a regent or something. Go somewhere sunny. You have any beaches around here? Have you ever even  _seen_ a fucking beach?”

“I know what a beach is.”

“That didn’t answer the question,” Taako says, horrified. “That didn’t even kind of answer the question. You’ve never been to a beach, have you?”

“I’ve sort of been to a beach.”

“If you have to say ‘sort of’ it doesn’t count, dingus. Ask her for a break! Or unionize, or something. Gods are not immune to collective bargaining!”

“You’re full of ideas, aren’t you?”

“If that was supposed to be an insult, it didn’t work, because a) hell yes, I am, and b) fuck you, I’m trying to help your overworked ass. No wonder you think reading about soil balances is fun, you’ve never been to a fucking beach.”

“It wasn’t an insult,” Kravitz says, tilting his head with inscrutable interest. He is watching Taako in much the same way a birdwatcher does a rare bird. “It’s a good quality.”

“Oh.” Abruptly, Taako loses all sense of what to do with his hands. It’s a tragedy. They flop around in his lap like limp brown fish, completely devoid of purpose or any sense of cool whatsoever. “Well. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.” The tea has cooled to the point of rancid bitterness, but Taako gulps down a mouthful to busy himself anyway. Kravitz, being apparently possessed of some blessed internal clock that tells him when to rescue Taako from his own ineptitude, keeps speaking. “I’ll admit, I didn’t expect you to be so invested.”

Never mind. Kravitz’s internal clock tells him jack shit except when it’s time to catapult Taako into even worse social situations, which is, apparently, all the time, always. “I’m not,” he says, which is the wrong thing, so he course-corrects, “I am, but it’s not like, I mean,” and reverses direction with a final, “Well, you know, I’m full of surprises,” after hearing which he promptly starts contemplating the benefits of hurling himself headfirst out into the snow, storm be damned.

He can hear Lup laughing:  _Why don’t you just shout ‘no homo’ while you’re at it, huh?_

Kravitz blinks. “That you are,” he agrees, clearly holding on to the thread of the conversation by merely a slender line. “I, er. Appreciate you taking tea with me? It was a nice diversion. I do have to get back to work though, so—”

“Yeah,” Taako blurts, shooting up. Kravitz rises with him, being, as per usual, gentlemanly as fuck. “That’d probably be for the best. Good talk. Thanks for the drink. It was . . . good tea.”

In the back of his head, Lup is accelerating into hysterics.

Kravitz walks him to the door. He hovers at a set distance — is Taako supposed to take his arm? Bow? Kiss his hand? It is a sincerely distressing situation — and bids him a formal goodbye, head dipping in a farewell nod.

Taako says, “Yeah, it’s been real,” because he’s smooth like that. “See you around.”

He’s already half out of the room when Kravitz calls, “Taako?”

He freezes. Without turning, he croaks, “Yes?”

The prince coughs politely. “Are you planning on giving back my book?”

_Shit_ . Taako fumbles with the book in his hands, and shoves it at him unceremoniously. “Oh. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead and it.”

The prince reaches out and carefully takes the outstretched end of the tome. Their fingers don’t touch. Taako notices, and then tries to forget that he did.

“Thank you,” Kravitz says. He smiles. “I promise to keep my business reading to a minimum.”

The prince has a nice smile. It’s small, but it’s nice. Taako bets the real one’s even better. With some time and maybe a few drinks, he bets he could pull the real one out of him. A laugh, too, if he’s lucky. He probably has a great laugh.

. . . And that’s a thought Taako would rather bathe in hot wax than dwell on, so with a grunt of acknowledgement, he takes a big old step out of the library and slams the door behind him.

He doesn’t make it three paces down the hallway before the wave of embarrassment crests overhead, and he stumbles against the wall, head pounding. He wishes Lup were here. He’s glad she isn’t.

It’s quite possible that he’s entirely fucked.


	3. Chapter 3

_L,_

_Full disclosure, I don’t know if ravens can actually carry letters or not, but seeing as otherwise I’m shit outta options here, I’m hoping you get this. Not holding out for anything, but._

_Long story short: didn’t kill him. There’s a storm and now I’m his houseguest. Also, I kind of like him. It sucks._

 

* * *

 

Days bleed into one another at the edges. Without the sunrise to tell one from another, time rolls out like an unbroken sprawl of parchment, daunting in its emptiness, dizzying in its length. Taako eats when he’s hungry and sleeps when he’s tired, and he still has more hours full of nothing than he’s ever had to wade through before in his life.

It’s the waiting that kills. It’s the dead-eyed stare at the sundial in the courtyard — which, when not buried entirely in snow, casts a shadow as faint and useless as a water stain on the stone beneath it — and the maddening lockstep of the grandfather clock in the great hall. It’s wandering around the same set of empty rooms for the eighth time that day, reducing even the labyrinthine hallways of Shadowfell Castle to a set of known quantities, their shadowed intrigue made rote by familiarity. It’s the dizzy, tenuous grasp on lucidity that comes with not knowing how much waiting is left, or how much has already been done, and it’s that uncertainty which rots sanity, eats reason, and convinces you that maybe the wait will never end, but instead will lapse into eternity.

Taako’s okay, most days. On others, it’s downright fucking intolerable.

He finds ways to occupy himself. Has to, otherwise he’d have long since dropped anchor and tossed his marbles to the wayside, and he point-blank refuses to lose his mind over  _boredom_ , of all things. Of all the lame ways to go.

The prince, upon observation, keeps a religious schedule, which is remarkably convenient for anyone seeking to bother him at any point during the day. If he can’t be found in the throne room, there’s easy money on him being in the library, dining hall, or his private quarters, whichever the hour suits most. Taako comes to regard it as his divinely entrusted duty to punish him for being so predictable.

Kravitz answers the door to his chambers within a minute of ferocious knocking.

_“What?_ Is something on fire, or — Taako?”

“Hi,” says Taako. “Do you know how to play shatranj?”

He holds out the board. It’s a bit battered and dusty, since he had to dig it up in the annals of some sitting room that from the looks of it hadn’t been touched by maid nor matron in the past dynasty.

“Yes,” Kravitz says, belatedly. “Why?”

Taako rolls his eyes. “Oh, well, see, I’m taking a survey—”

“Never mind,” the prince says, adorably embarrassed, and steps aside to let Taako in. “Right. Sorry, I should have . . . yes. Well. Come in, then.”

Taako waltzes into the room without preamble, surveys it for an available flat space to place the board on, and finding none, deposits it directly on top of Kravitz’s desk, eliciting a quiet sound of protest from Kravitz. Taako drops himself down in the other chair, folds his arms defiantly, and mentally readies his list of four reasons, six and a half good arguments, and one elaborately worded plea as to why this is a better use of his time than working.

Except he doesn’t get a chance to call up any of them, because the prince merely folds himself into other chair without protest, and reaches for his pieces. “Red or green?” he inquires.

“Red,” Taako says, deflated and suspicious from having the wind unrighteously torn out of his sails. He sets up his side of the board, shooting periodic glances up from under his eyelashes at Kravitz, who is suspiciously absorbed in placing his pieces.

“I, uh. Kind of expected you to say no,” he hedges.

“Why? I like shatranj.” Kravitz idly rolls one of the chariots between his fingers. 

“Yeah, but. You seemed busy.”

“Yet you asked anyway?”

“My man, if I waited until you weren’t busy to make demands on your time, we wouldn’t hang out.”

A snort. “True enough.” He straightens two adjacent pieces.

“Can’t you delegate some of it?” Taako drops his chariots onto a pair of random squares, hardly glancing at where they land. He only ever makes an effort when he’s playing for money or pride, and he doubts either’s at risk. “Don’t you have a staff? Assistants? You’re the  _prince.”_

“Yes. And they do. The Royal Council takes care of more matters in a day than I see on my desk in a month.”

“Tell them to take on more,” Taako suggests.

“I would prefer not to rain oil on that particular fire.”

“Why? See above: you’re the prince. Also, apparently, the second-in-command to a god or something. If I’m a lord, you won’t catch me pissing  _that_ guy off, I’ll tell you that.”

“You say that, but I don’t seem to intimidate  _you_ much.” He frowns. “At all. Do you know that’s unusual? I’m told I cut an imposing figure.”

“Yeah, well, it takes a lot more to psych out the Taako than it does a bunch of namby-pamby lords.” Taako plucks his king out from the pile of remaining pieces and plants him squarely in the middle of his phalanx, completing his setup. “Anyway, I’m ready when you are.”

Kravitz takes a while deciding where to settle his king. He eyes the board with a strategist’s view, turning the pieces over in his hands before placing them, as if he’s watching several different possible games play out simultaneously in his head. He’s dreadfully premeditated in a way that Taako never had to worry about when he played with Lup. It occurs to Taako with dawning horror that Kravitz may very well beat him, which would be an abjectly terrible prospect for both their egos.

“You’re not secretly good at this, are you?” Taako demands of him warily. “Like, are you a shatranj shark, or something? You legally have to tell me if that’s the case.”

“I don’t think that’s true, actually.”

“Don’t play cute with me, mister.”

Kravitz huffs, and either Taako is getting better at reading him or he’s getting worse at hiding his amusement. “I’m not a grandmaster, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Okay, so that’s not comforting at  _all_ . On a scale from one to ‘I’m about to decimate this guy’s ass and he doesn’t know it,’ where do you stand?”

“Hmm. Seven.”

Taako narrows his eyes. “You think you’re funny,” he accuses.

Kravitz nods, all solemn remorse. “Guilty,” he says gravely, and moves his first soldier forward.

(Taako loses the first four games out of six. On the bright side, it takes Kravitz five to figure out he’s cheating.)

 

* * *

 

_The Winterlands are spooky as shit, BTW. It’s damp and cold and the storm makes it so you can’t see thesun even in the three hours a day you’re supposed to. Place_ reeks _of magic, too. Old magic. Creepy magic. Kind of magic you wouldn’t want to meet coming down an alley at night. Sounds coming from in empty rooms, things disappearing, the whole kit and caboodle. Shit’s weird._

_I think it’s getting to me. I keep having these dreams—_

 

* * *

 

He’s drowning.

He’s drowning and he’s dying, probably, and he can’t make it stop. 

He knows he’s dreaming. That doesn’t make it better. 

It’s always the same to begin with. He starts off comfortable, if a bit numb. Floaty. Distant. Not happy, exactly, but anesthetized, as though he’d taken a soporific before bed. Mist, shapeless figures, watered-down sounds. Whispers. His name, somewhere, as if heard through water.

Cold, the kind that burns worse than a nude dip in an ice floe.

It never changes, the next part. Not even if he tries; knowing that he’s dreaming doesn’t let him do a damn thing to affect it. Lucidity only makes it worse, as a matter of fact, because then he knows what’s coming. 

Every night, without fail, Taako drowns.

The feeling of it keeps getting worse, too. It burns more every night. Aches more every night. He dreads going to sleep because he knows it’ll bring this, the relentless glut of water in his lungs, the desperate gasp for air that doesn’t come. He’s drowning and he’s dying, and when he claws at his throat his hands come away covered with black feathers.

 

* * *

 

_. . . anyway, on the bright side, I’m eating better than ever. They have fresh fruit, like, all the time here. Where they get it in the middle of winter I sure as hell don’t know. Maybe that’s part of the whole RQ deal? Like, blessed be my disciples, they shall feast on fresh produce for ever? IDK. Not my ballgame, although give me a few more days of fresh fruit breakfasts and I might be willing to consider it. (Don’t tell Istus.)_

 

* * *

 

With the lords, Kravitz is a different person.

Not bad different. Just different.

Taako notices this when he encounters them filing out of a council meeting in the War Room. Dressed in fine grey furs and stiff-collared jackets pressed sharp enough to strangulate, they linger in the hallway a while, chatting, obnoxiously jangling their jewelry at each other. Taako gives hefty consideration to the prospect of pickpocketing them, but by the time he’s formulating a plan to slip the signet ring off one’s pasty fat finger he’s already been noticed. As he approaches down the hallway, he’s accosted by a host of curious glances, most of them halfway to hostile and accelerating.

The exceptions are Sloane and Hurley, with whom he exchanges a brief nod as they pass him by. The Ministers of War and Laws are uncharacteristically subdued; Sloane is glowering at the middle distance as though it threatened to flay her firstborn.

Hurley leans in as they pass each other and murmurs, “It was a long one. Wouldn’t bother him if you need something, it’s not a great time.”

Sloane grunts.

“So what are they doing?” He jerks his head at the knot of lords who still surround Kravitz, three of whom are trying to hold three separate conversations with him at once.

Hurley says simply, “Wrestling with futility.”

“Jerking their dicks,” Sloane snarls. 

Taako gapes at her, rendered speechless with delight.

Hurley curses under her breath, checks to see if anyone heard, and hastily winds her arm through Sloane’s. With a brisk tug, she begins hauling her wife out of firing range of the other lords, a task made arduous by said wife’s apparent unwillingness to yield an inch of ground. “As I said,” she calls apologetically, “long meeting. Sorry. See you later!”

By the time Taako makes his way close enough to hear what Kravitz is saying, he has successfully dispatched one of the attendant lords, although two still cling to him like barnacles to the world’s weariest ship’s hull. One is insisting, with puerile earnestness, “—for the sake of everyone, I think my proposal is worth the thought, sire, considering not only the, the, the diplomatic potential it presents for the Crown, but also, that is to say, should you give it a moment’s consideration, I believe—”

Kravitz flicks his fingers at him in dismissal, with uncharacteristic callousness. “Certainly,” he says, voice vague in a way that suggests its opposite. He’s back in the deeper register of his voice, poshly accented, with drawling vowels that make Taako wonder how he doesn’t choke on the silver spoon under his tongue. The lords don’t seem to notice how wildly incongruous it is, or that it’s even fake, which is frankly more hilarious than the accent itself.

The lord he interrupts cuts himself off with a splutter like a retching cat. Kravitz smoothly intercedes. “Thank you for your counsel,” he says, and then: “Pardon me, gentlemen. You’re free to linger, of course, but I have business to attend to.”

Even Taako winces at that one, struggling as he is not to laugh.

Turning on his heel, the prince strides away from the group. Taako doesn’t have the chance to call out to him, because he’s around the corner and gone before anyone can reel him back. It is, for Kravitz, an unprecedentedly cold-blooded move.

And Taako may be more seriously fucked than he initially planned for, because — watching his cape swirl dramatically around the corner, amidst the muffled dismay of the surrounding nobility — he likes the prince all the more for it.

 

* * *

 

_I miss you. Also, the sun. And warmth. And outfits with less than three layers._

 

* * *

 

“No offense or anything, but your castle is haunted.”

He’s hanging upside down from one of the chairs in the library, hands folded politely in his lap. Kravitz is bent over his work, copying down some complex writ or other that he explained to Taako earlier and Taako promptly forgot.

“Why would that offend me?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to make sure you were, you know —  _aware_ — that the place you live in has got spooky vibrations coming out the wazoo.”

His quill continues its neat path across the page, unbothered. He’s becoming slowly but surely inoculated against Taako’s attempts to distract him, which naturally just means Taako has to try harder. 

Kravitz says, “It’s a very large, very old building. A degree of spookiness is almost required. A certain  _je ne sais quoi_ , if you will.”

“What, is that Anaurochi for ‘totally fucked-up, creepy vibe’?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“It isn’t, is it.”

“No.”

He looks suspiciously close to smiling. Taako sniffs and sits up in the chair, languidly rearranging himself to sprawl across the armrests. “Well, even so, yours is a cut above the rest,” he informs him. “Congratulations. Your place? It’s on a whole new level of nightmarish.”

“Is that so.”

“You’d need, like, a squad of exorcists to deal with this one, my man. A troop. A platoon.”

“A legion, perhaps?”

“Precisely.” Taako snaps his fingers at him. “A bunch, is what I’m saying.”

Kravitz clucks his tongue. “See, there’s your problem. Too expensive. I’d never get the initiative past the council.” He dabs his quill in the inkwell.

“Have you tried telling them it’s fucking  _haunted?”_

“I think they know,” he says dryly; “most of them also live here, you see.”

“Then tell them to get on it! Before one of you gets shanked in your sleep by some old dead guy with a grudge!”

“Why, Taako,” he says, light but vaguely sincere. “I didn’t take you for the superstitious type.”

At that, Taako rights himself fully, his spine ramrod-straight with injurious disbelief. “Superstitious,” he says, “is what you call your aging aunt when she makes you bury a lock of your hair in the garden because you spilled the salt. Superstitious is folding down your ears when you pass a graveyard so the spirits can’t sneak into them and possess you. Superstitious is  _fake_ . Caring about ghosts, in a world with legitimate, scientifically documented Real Ass Ghosts, is called  _taking due caution_ , and frankly you’re pretty cavalier about it for a guy whose job is dealing with the undead. Invest in your home security, is what I’m saying.”

“All right,” Kravitz says. “Say you’re correct, and it is haunted. What aroused your suspicions? Let’s hear the evidence.”

“Oh, come on. You can’t tell me that you haven’t noticed.”

“I can’t go before the council without evidence, Taako,” Kravitz points out, matter-of-factly.

“I — fine. You want evidence? How about the fact that the paintings move when you’re not looking? I’ve run past the same painting of some crotchety ancestor of yours like four times today, every single fucking time he’s been peeping in a different direction—”

“That’s an optical illusion. The elements of perspective and shadow in a painting are fixed, which means—”

“Bullshit, but okay, whatever, that’s not the only thing. I’ve heard noises coming from empty hallways. Laughter, whispering, that kind of thing, and Krav, I swear to God I’m not going crazy.”

“Ah. That’ll be the servant’s passages,” he explains simply. “You probably heard them moving through the walls. A lot of them are pretty old, they pick up a bad echo. Many of the staff have stopped using them, but the people who’ve been here a while sometimes prefer—”

“That’s still creepy, but whatever. Some of my shit keeps going missing—”

“The maids aren’t perfect, sometimes they’ll put things away without knowing where you want them. Speak to them, if it bothers you.”

“—candles flickering, floorboards creaking—”

“All right, well, now you’re just describing normal things. They’re old floorboards, and we have a draft. That’s not supernatural phenomena.”

“—I have trouble sleeping, I get these weird fucking death dreams, my coffee’s always cold—”

Kravitz’s quill scratches to a halt in the middle of a word.

“What?” He turns in his chair to Taako, dedicating the whole of his attention to a conversation that had, estimating generously, probably only consumed a fraction beforehand. Writ across his face is a disgruntled medley of confusion and alarm.

“My coffee’s always cold. I’m telling you, I brew it with boiling hot water, and the second I turn my back I’ve got a caffeinated popsicle on my hands—”

“No, the other — you’re dreaming?”

Taako shrugs. “Yeah. Elves do it, too. Don’t look so surprised.”

“I’m not — I didn’t think — you’re dreaming about death?”

“Or something,” Taako says vaguely, flapping his hand. “It’s cold, and I’m drowning, and it’s weird as all hell. I don’t remember them all that well.” 

Which is a bald-faced rotten black lie. But details invite curiosity, and he’s not all that interested in plumbing the annals of dream analysis. For one thing, in terms of prophecy, none of them can mean anything good. He doesn’t have to be a soothsayer to recognize the significance of  _death_ , as an omen. It doesn’t spell wonders for his future. And, on the off chance that they’re nothing supernatural at all, and mere manifestations of his own fucked-up relationship with virtually every aspect of his life, he’d rather eat glass than give Kravitz a free tour of his subconscious.

“You should take a draught for dreamless sleep,” Kravitz says.

“Uh. Sure, homie. Whatever.” Taako puts a little too much flippancy on that one; it comes out overcooked with insincerity. He abates, and shift. “You think it’s serious?”

The prince twiddles with the quill in his hands, absently bleeding ink over his fingers. His gaze reaches out into the middle distance, his brow bent in a tight frown.

“Krav?”

“Dreams aren’t nothing, here,” Kravitz says obliquely. Which, while exceedingly sinister, fails to actually impart any useful information, not the least of which might have been clarification on the subject of what  _here_ means. Nor does the prince offer any such clarity. No: having delivered this ominous proclamation, the bastard promptly turns back to work, having been, Taako thinks spitefully, of no help what-so-fucking-ever.

 

* * *

 

_Mostly you, though._

_—T_

 

* * *

 

The storm keeps on. It’s a comfort of its own kind, the constancy, or at least it would be if it didn’t take the form of one monumental pain in the ass. He sends off a raven with a letter to Lup tied to his ankle and wonders how long it’ll take it to get across the pass, assuming it does, assuming it can.

Kravitz has no surfeit of helpful wisdom to offer in that area, either.

“It’s hard to say,” he offers only, when Taako asks about how long it’ll go on. “The longest lasted a few months, but that was years ago — hundreds of years, they say — it probably won’t last that long.”

“How close is ‘probably’ to ‘maybe’?”

“Not near,” he says, but it’s a little less than certain.

Not that Taako  _minds_ being around with Kravitz. The man’s a goddamn delight, when he’s not up to his armpits in work and bitter bureaucracy. He’s funny, although you’d have to know him to realize it, since his delivery is dry as a good white wine, and his straight face could win any dozen hands at any poker table in the realm. 

Except when he does break character, it’s obvious. To Taako, at least. His mouth twitches and his eyes get shifty, and once it’s gone, it’s gone, there’s no getting his composure back; he has to excuse himself if he wants to recover. He hides his mouth with his hand whenever he’s amused in public and gets crinkles in the corners of his eyes when he laughs, but he doesn’t ever really laugh, not with abandon. The Prince of the Winterlands has a suit of armor around his heart smithed from solid platinum, and he only ever drops guard when he’s alone.

He’s patient with the servants and utterly impatient with the lords, has a repertoire of courtly gestures ripped right out of a dated etiquette manual, speaks six languages fluently, and reads history books for fun. He wears silk waistcoats and drinks lemon tea in the afternoons and is a grand proxime at shatranj, which is only one step down from a grandmaster and sometimes he is the most shit-eating bastard Taako’s ever spoken to. He’s  _fun_ .

Taako would pick his company over most of anybody he knows in Faerun, and that’s not even including the ones who want to kill him.

It’s just that half his family’s on the other side of that mountain, and that’s an injury no amount of handsome is gonna fix.

He’s also getting worried about John.

More specifically he’s worried about himself, re: John, and what John will or will not do when he figures out that Taako has done virtually the opposite of what he asked. He still doesn’t know what he’s going to say.  _Cheers, buddy! Here’s your money back. Hey, also, how about you stop trying to kill him? I kind of don’t want him dead, actually!_

Which is another thing — he’s not the only assassin out there. And Kravitz, immutable force of nature though he may be with that scythe, isn’t a god, either.

He’s toyed with the idea of lying. John said he’d take the prince’s cloak as proof of completion. If Kravitz would let Taako have the cloak, just the cloak, he could bring it back with him, buy enough time to figure something else out—

“No,” says Kravitz.

He stalks down the hallway to the throne room like he’s got eight places to be and he needed to be at all of them five minutes ago. Taako has to jog to keep up with him, which is a compliment he thinks Kravitz should take more seriously on account of Taako doesn’t hurry himself for  _anybody_ .

“Why not?”

“Why should I? Do you want a cloak? We can get you a cloak, if that’s what you want.”

“But why not yours?”

“Is there a particular reason that you should want mine?”

“I dunno, you tell me. Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

“Why is the onus on me, here, exactly?” He hands off a stack of parchment to a passing squire without breaking stride. Taako deftly sidesteps the lad and keeps jogging.

“What’s the holdup? Is it an heirloom, or something?”

“It’s — not that this is any of your business—”

“Duh.”

“—but it’s a magical item,” Kravitz says. “A gift from the Raven Queen.” He flags down another squire. “Could you take these? Find Lord Dolohov, tell him I’ll be there in five minutes—”

Isn’t that interesting. “What does it do?”

“It — crow’s  _claws_ , Taako, do we have to do this right now?”

“I’m just curious.”

“It lets me travel to the Astral Plane,” he says, and before Taako can really process it, he adds, “Please don’t take that as an invitation to steal it, by the way. It won’t work for you; you’re not consecrated.”

“I — okay, first of all, ouch. I wouldn’t steal it.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Hey! I wouldn’t!”

“Taako, please.” He’s not even irritated; he’s  _smiling_ , obviously endeared, which Taako finds highly patronizing.

“I wouldn’t! If I was going to snatch it, you think I would’ve bothered asking first?” 

“I suppose not.” It is suspiciously pacificatory. Taako brandishes an indignant finger at him.

“Listen, if this is about the sconces, then I’m sorry, but you were busy and I was bored. I think it’s time you got over it.”

“I’m not mad about the sconces.”

“Good. They’re ugly anyway.”

“But,” he says, and continues over Taako’s groaning, “you can’t just steal things whenever I’m too busy to talk. It’s inappropriate—”

“I feel like we’re getting hung up on the wrong thing, here.”

“—if you want something, you should ask me for it, I don’t see why you feel the need—”

“We’re talking about your cloak,” Taako insists loudly.

“Yes, well, I still don’t know why you want that, either.”

Taako babbles the first lie that comes to mind, which unfortunately ends up being, “Well, you know. S’ a good look on you, my man. Top quality haute couture. Thinking about getting me some fresh threads. Anyway, have fun with your nerd shit.”

That declaration is dead on arrival. It is a putrid live sacrifice of a sentence getting rancid on the altar of awkward. Kravitz doesn’t even say anything to it, just lets it marinate in a bitter glaze of stunned silence, as though he can’t believe what he heard, either. 

By and by he opens his mouth to reply and it’s at that exact moment Taako decides there’s really no way to salvage the conversation except to toss it on the bonfire and bolt, so he makes like a snake in a direwolf den and flees, legging it down a side hallway.

Either the prince is starting to fluster him or he’s getting worse at lying. Both are truly horrifying thoughts.

He doesn’t know when saving the prince’s life became a priority. By all accounts, it’s a deeply disturbing development.

 

* * *

 

The storm keeps on — until it doesn’t.

One day, Taako wakes up not to the sound of the wind bloodying itself against his window, but a deafening lack thereof. He sits up and immediately has to squint through the deluge of blinding light that pours through his window, glancing off the blanket of fresh snow. The sight’s so unfamiliar that it takes him a whole moment to process it, but once he does, he’s bounding out of bed with a speed that tears the sheets clean off the mattress, racing to the window and stumbling when his limbs are slower to wake than his brain.

Shadowfell in sunlight is a foreign land. It glitters under the coat of ice and snow like a ridge of crystal, a sparkling white geode cracked open amongst the surrounding mountains. Smoke gushes from the assorted chimneys of the streets below, but it moves with a merry purpose. Now that he can actually see the streets through the fog, Taako can see the crowds that pulse and surge down the alleys between buildings, moving in brisk, lively formations, the lifeblood of a city thrumming energetically around its heart. 

The skies here are shades paler than the electric blue of Faerun summers, dotted here and there with cottony wisps of clouds, and washed out by the sun — but they’re still the loveliest color Taako’s ever seen.

He snatches up the first set of clothes within reach and hurtles out the door.

Only when he’s already sprinted halfway to Kravitz’s chambers, in several instances literally bouncing off the walls from an the adrenaline-spiked cocktail that is an excess of speed and a shortage of coordination, does he actually think about the reality of what it means. He gets to leave now. Go home. Put the castle to his back and run for the hills. Turn tail on the whole dark, cold, gloomy puddle of slush that is the Winterlands, and go back to living somewhere he can count on at least a daily hour of sun.

It means never seeing Kravitz again. Taako waits for the pang of regret that registers at the thought to fade, to age into a reluctant acceptance, but it doesn’t. It just keeps on aching.

He’s not sure why it’s doing that, and moreover he’s not interested. He drops the sensation into the back of his mind, right next to the stack of metaphorical boxes containing his relationship with authority, Lup’s love life, and the other wide, wonderful variety of things Taako would trade three fingers off each hand to never think about again.

The doors to Kravitz’s chambers are locked. Taako pounds on them without patience. He’s half ready to cast Knock and barge on through, hang propriety and privacy and whatever Kravitz may be doing, because Taako isn’t getting on the road without a goodbye, and he wants to get on the road as soon as possible. But after a minute or so of steady knocking, the doors remain shut with no whiff of life behind them. It’s odd, given that he can usually pester Kravitz into giving some kind of reply within the first fifteen seconds.

“Krav, it’s me.” That usually brings him out, when knocking doesn’t. 

It doesn’t, today. For some reason.

Taako raises his voice, as if that’ll help. “I want to say goodbye, you dingus. Have you looked outside?” 

The prince answers with nothing.

He raps on the door with special viciousness. “Kravitz! Come out or I’m coming in! This is your only warning!”

This charitable declaration of intent receives neither thanks nor reply. If Kravitz thinks he’s calling his bluff, he’s deluding himself, and clearly doesn’t know Taako all that well.

“Listen, I’m gonna give you five seconds, because it’s sunny and cha’boy’s feeling generous, but if I hit six and you’re not standing in front of me, I’m just up and coming in, and I  _will_ compromise the structural integrity of your doors to do it. You want that? These are some nice doors. You really want ’em busted up, sire?”

He doesn’t actually start counting seconds from five. He’d figured that the threat would be enough. Nevertheless, at least twice that amount of time passes without response.

“Krav?” He stops knocking. The silence has grown in volume. It riots in his ears. He calls, “Are you okay?”

A lack of answer to  _that_ catapults him from a state of mild but mounting irritation to trigger-happy agitation at the speed of fucking light. Magic pulses in his palms and he lays them flat against the wood, groping blindly for the first demolition spell he can think of that won’t bring the hallway down around him—

“He’s not here.”

It snaps his concentration like an anvil dropped on thin ice. The magic spasms and escapes, harmless. Taako pivots, his heart rabbiting from his own embarrassing lack of environmental awareness. Since when could anybody sneak up on him?

Sloane leans against the wall behind him, arms folded, her mouth a twisted red slash of smug amusement. They eye each other. Taako wonders if he can Dimension Door out of the hallway without putting himself through a wall or dropping himself headfirst down a flight of stairs.

“When did you get there?”

“Around the time you started ransoming my liege’s doors,” she says, and he honestly can’t tell if the glitter in her eyes is menace or mirth. With her, the two are twin edges of the same sword.

Taako calculates his odds of just running for it and finds them slim, so instead he makes a bid for honesty. “I need to talk to the prince.”

“Sounded like it.”

“. . . So do you know where he is?”

“Sure,” she says, agreeably enough. “Three doors down and a few planes over. He was called for an audience with the Queen.”

“The  _god?”_

“ _A_ god. We’re not that presumptuous.”

Taako’s mind grapples fruitlessly with the concept. In theory, he’d understood that Kravitz’s job meant popping in and out of the Astral Plane at will; but in practice— “What does she want him for?”

“You’ll have to drop her a prayer yourself, if you want an answer to that one,” Sloane drawls, standing up and twisting her arms above her head. It exaggerates her height, puts emphasis on the quarter-foot she’s got on him. “Or get in touch with a cleric. I can’t help with either, unfortunately.” She nods at the doors. “What do you need him for?”

Numbly, Taako says, “I’m leaving.”

“Oh?” She drops her arms, abruptly and inexplicably at attention. “Why?”

“I was only staying until the pass cleared. The storm stopped.”

A line appears between her brows. “. . . And?”

Maybe they’re speaking different languages. “. . .  _And_ , I can go home now.”

The line deepens into a whole canyon of confusion. “Not over the pass, you can’t.”

“But — the storm—”

A flash of clarity washes her face clean of all consternation. It leaves behind it only a mask of smug. “Ah. Here’s the thing about the snow, fledgling,” she says generously, and leans back against the wall, restoring her spine to a slouch. “It has to melt.”

“Sorry?”

“Just because the storm’s stopped doesn’t mean the pass is clear. You need more than a few hours of good weather, for that.”

Taako doesn’t give her the satisfaction of showing his dismay, but it pricks at him nevertheless, hot and ugly in his belly. “How long is that supposed to take?”

Sloane flicks an invisible piece of lint from her shoulder. “How long will the sun last? How long before the storms come back? The pass won’t unfreeze in a night, that’s certain.”

The thing that rises in him is a unique and poignant breed of despair marbled with relief. It is confusing as all hell and makes him want to vomit. “Oh,” he says, and he’s sure that whatever his voice conveys, it makes just as little sense to Sloane as it does to him; she arches an eyebrow.

“That said,” she says, “the weather’s not totally useless. You’ve haven’t seen a lick of the countryside, have you, fledge?”

He doesn’t like her tone at all.

“I looked my fill on the way in from the mountains. Tundra, tundra, and — wait, let me guess — more tundra, am I right?”

“Oh, no,” she says delightedly, savoring the words as if they are a pair of choicest delicacies. “No. You wouldn’t say that if you’ve seen it up close and personal. Goodness, no.”

“Tragic. Guess I’ll die not knowing! My burden to bear. Anyway—”

“You don’t have to,” she says, which is what he was afraid of. “Me and Hurley are riding out to the Razorback Cliffs today. It’s a nice scenic journey.”

“Right, so actually, I have this personal rule against going anywhere that has ‘razorback’ in the name, it’s just this little thing I came up with for my personal comfort—”

“They’re not all that dangerous. And considering that you traveled across the Spine to get here, they’ll be downright friendly in comparison. Plus, you’ll have Hurley and I there. Or don’t you trust us?”

Even Taako, ill-versed as he is in the intricacies of court doublespeak, can read ‘danger’ when it’s spelled out in the slight cock of her head.

“Well, also, this seems like a date thing that you had planned with your wife, and I don’t want to third-wheel—”

“Oh, Hurley will be more than happy to have you,” she says easily. “As will I.”

There must be some combination of words, in this weird, hellish pseudo-language of the nobility, that will get it through her skull that the answer is  _no_ .

Be that as it may, Taako can’t find them, so he says: “Fine, sure, whatever,” and stomps away with what he hopes is palpable disgruntlement.

She doesn’t let him get far. “Where are you going?” she calls, innocently inquiring.

He turns on his heel with the willingness of a poorly oiled hinge.

Sloane jerks her head down the hallway, a small, sly smile curling her mouth. “The stables are this way,” she says.

 

* * *

 

It takes less than setting one foot over the threshold of Shadowfell Castle for Taako to bitterly regret his decision. 

Even swaddled in the old fur riding cloak that the stable master rustles up for him, which is grey and fading and smells heavily of mothballs, the wind welcomes him into its arms with the kiss of an affectionate barracuda. The sunlight, nice as it is for things like seeing more than five feet in front of his face, has accounted for fuck all in temperature, and he collapses into violent shudders from cold almost immediately. His breath crystallizes barely after it leaves his mouth. Every step comes hard-won across the deep snow over the footpaths, wrestling against the suction drag of slush piles around his ankles. In contrast, Sloane, springing across the snow in a heavy leather greatcoat and a daring white scarf, moves with an ease that is an affront to Taako’s very dignity.

“Stable’s not a far walk,” she calls, invigorated. “Hup hup! Hurley’s waiting!”

Blinking against the searing light, he staggers out into the snow, his coattails dragging behind him like the plumage of a particularly pathetic, downy bird.

True to her word, the walk isn’t long, although what it lacks in duration it makes up for in abject fucking misery. When he stumbles into the relative warmth of the stables, he lacks the energy for anything but dull relief. Hurley arrived ahead of them, and holds the door, suited up in a fine brown riding habit that gleams with fresh polish. Combed back flat across her skull, her hair is smoothed immaculately into place under a cap, and a flush rides high and happy on the apples of her cheeks.

“Sloane,” she says, and then, with more surprise, but no less gladness: “Taako,” and she surges forward to clasp his arm in greeting. “I’m happy you could join us.”

“That makes one of us.”

Sloane claps a hand on his shoulder. “The prince is gone today,” she informs Hurley. “I thought we could take his new companion out for a spin to the Razorbacks.”

“Companion?” Taako shrills. “What does that mean, companion?”

“That’s a pretty trail,” Hurley agrees.

“Do we have a mount for him? I don’t want to start him off with any of the finicky ones, his first time out.”

“ _Excuse me_ ,” says Taako. “Sorry, pardon. First?”

“I’m certain we do,” Hurley says, brow furrowing, and she beckons him down the rows of stables. “We could try Karaan, he hardly ever rears anymore . . . Worse case, we can always give him the prince’s mare. She’s sweet as starlight, wouldn’t bite a hand that beat her.”

“Doesn’t like strangers, though.”

“Ah, but he’s not a stranger,” Hurley says, and winks at him, which he has not an idea in the least what to do with. Normally he’d fire her a pair of middle fingers just to cover his bases, but she outranks him by about a whole caste system and from the look of her could snap his spine across her knee without mussing her hair. “Still, she’s tuckered out. Let’s try Argo.”

She leads him to one of the stalls. Through the bars of its door Taako can barely make out some great mound of rippling black muscle, accompanied by an agitated series of huffs. 

“All right,” Hurley says. She lays a hand on the gate but doesn’t open it, not yet. “When you get up close and personal with him, you’re gonna want to get him by the bridle and keep him there, all right? That’ll show him that he can’t push you around. Sloane and I will be here to help, obviously, but you’ll have to get the bridle yourself, else he won’t respect you. You got it?”

“No!”

“Don’t worry, you’ll do fine,” she chirps, and flings open the stable door.

Taako’s stomach makes a violent bid for freedom.

In abstract, the shadowbeast looks like a horse, if horses were a clumsy hack job slapped together out of charcoal and smoke by someone who had never actually seen one in person, and also happened to be the meanest motherfucker who ever lived.

A spiked frill rises from the back of its neck in place of a mane. Its eyes shine the flat yellow of something you might find at the bottom of the pond, slit with blades of pupils, and when its lips curl up it bears neat rows of long, arched teeth that each run the length of Taako’s finger. 

It gutters a monstrous snarl from the back of its throat. The sound scrapes against the bottom of his ears and rocks around in his brain, rooting him to the spot with a spasm of paralysis, and with a roll of its massive shoulders it surges up onto its back legs—

—and Taako finds himself staring at the corded underbelly of two tons of raw muscle and hate. Its hooves flail and miss his head by all of nowhere near enough for comfort, and it’s still shrieking a sound that registers somewhere in Taako’s animal hindbrain as  _death_ , and he regrets not cultivating a better relationship with his god while he had the time because he’s got a feeling he’s about to meet her soon. 

“Hey, now,” he finds himself saying, words tumbling out of his mouth on the wings of what must be naught but pure pants-shitting fear and adrenaline because he sure as shit hasn’t got anything else in him, “you can calm the fuck down, okay. Hey, now.”

Miraculously, it  _does._ The shadowmount’s cry thins into a raspy whine and it drops back onto its hooves with a bewildering, if reluctant, deference. It gives a sulky chuff and snaps its jaws at Taako mulishly, but makes no further attempt to actually murder him, which represents a remarkable improvement in their rapport and emboldens Taako.

“That’s right, big boy, just go on and calm the fuck down. There’s a good . . . whatever the hell you are.”

It snarls. He snaps, “Cut it out, you look like a primo jackass,” and the shadowmount swallows the snarl and ducks its head. One of its hooves cracks open the floorboards beneath it, but that’s more petulant than threatening, like a kid slamming the bedroom door so hard a painting drops, and otherwise it settles into a middling calm and fuck  _yes_ , Taako is the best goddamn shadowmount handler who ever lived. He is the god-king of wildlife and animal husbandry. It’s him.

The mount’s coat is something a little stiffer than fur, and a little more pliant than scales. Taako glides his hand across it, running across a series of ridges in its leathery flank. The shadowmount shudders and then in the same moment, allowing the touch.

“Oh, good,” Hurley says, sounding all too mildly pleased, for someone witnessing a masterwork of animal handling the likes of which his generation will not likely spawn another. “He likes you.”

He snickers. “Yeah, like oil loves water.”

“No, he does. See how he’s listening to you?” She tugs a saddle down from a hook on the wall. “He’s gone quiet when you told him to. You’ve got his respect.”

“What the fuck do they do if they  _don’t_ respect you, then?”

Hurley laughs as if he’s said something uproariously funny, and slings the saddle over its back. “Giddup,” she says, and swats it affectionately on the hindquarters. Incredibly, the beast does not kick her through the wall, but instead nickers at her with a peeved, pained resignation. “Go on and saddle up, there, Taako. Sloane and I will be behind you shortly, she’s getting ours ready.”

Taako and the shadowmount eye each other with equal skepticism at this prospect.

“What do I do to control him?”

“Wrong question,” Sloane says, leading a pair of absolute behemoth shadowmounts into view. Neither of them so much as make sneer at her; whatever spell she’s got them under, Taako wants a piece of it. “Fatal question.  _Bad_ question, fledge. I’d have thought better of you than to ask it.”

He snaps, “Well, what am I supposed to do with it, then?”

She tugs one by the reins. “You can’t bind a thing like them to your will, like you can an ordinary animal. Won’t work. It’ll get both of you hurt, trying.”

“So?”

“So you’ve got to be good to him,” she answers, only she’s not looking at him anymore, but unerringly at Hurley, who appears to have forgotten Taako’s existence. 

He might as well be a fly on the wall for all they care. He is less than a gnat to them now. The gaze Hurley fixes upon her lady wife is practically sick with love, and Sloane, in her own . . . Sloane-ish way, returns it. They are sticky with moon-eyed rapture. They weep proprietary tenderness. Neither strikes him as much the type for sentimentality, but here run deep strata of things unspoken, and not for the first time he finds himself fathoms out of his depth.

Taako coughs loudly.

“Thanks for that,” he says unappreciatively, “but I was more asking how to make him hold still long enough to sit on him, actually.”

Hurley breaks first, not surprisingly, since Sloane he suspects could comfortably go on ignoring him until the sun burned cold, if it suited her. Hurley hikes in a breath and stutters, “Oh, well, that’s simple. Same mechanisms as any other mount. Once he knows you, he’ll be more attuned to your needs — they’re good at sensing a rider. Very intelligent animals, shadowmounts. And fast.” She grins. “The fastest alive.”

“Oh, joy. So like horses, but smarter, faster, and — oh, yeah,  _evil_ . Great. I love this.” 

“Get saddled up,” Sloane snorts, leading the other two mounts away. “If you ride half as well as you run your mouth, you’ll outpace us both before the day’s out.”

He braces a foot in the stirrup and grudgingly hauls himself up. “If this motherfucker throws me, I’m done,” he warns her, even as she moves out of earshot. “I’m out. I’m going back to my room and  _staying_ there until the pass melts. Nothing about your country is normal! Nothing. In Faerun, our idea of a good afternoon is a picnic or some shit, you know? A nice lunch. Maybe a walk in the park afterwards. Relaxing shit. But here, no, let’s just run around trying to ride feral demons for funsies! That’s a good time in the Winterlands. That’s how you get your kicks in this place. You and your  _death god_ and your  _evil horses_ — ’kind of person even comes up with the idea to  _ride_ one of these motherfuckers, anyway, who was the first back-asswards lunatic who looked at this asshole and thought, ‘oh, hell yeah, lemme get on top of  _that_ ’—”

“You’re up,” Hurley says, and he squints at her trying to figure out what she means before looking down and realizing that he’s seated comfortably on the back of the shadowmount. It tosses its head with a bit of attitude, but otherwise doesn’t object to the situation.

“I stand by what I said,” he informs her, with dignity.

“I’m sure you do.” She grins and slaps the mount’s side, causing it to skitter forward a few paces. Taako rocks violently in the saddle and heaves forward, clinging to the neck for dear life.

“Come on,” Hurley says, grinning like a woman holding a lit match over a kindling mountain. “I’ll show you how we back-assward lunatics have fun.”

 

* * *

 

Riding a shadowmount’s not so unlike riding a horse that he has to learn it all over again, but it’s different enough as to need focus. Sloane and Hurley bound forward over the snow fields, cutting an arrow’s path out to the roving hills that cup Shadowfell in the northwest. Taako follows for most of it. It’s rough going, for most of it, and he’ll be wearing full garters of bruises come next morning, but once he’s been at it for a while it stops aching and they tumble into a sort of clumsy rhythm. It hardly takes a touch of the reins to send the shadowmount tearing forward, nor more than a tug to jolt it to a halt, and they can turn on a copper with the speed of a falcon whirling in flight. If anything, they’re eager to move; once he’s been running for a while, Argo seems in considerably better spirits. He only tries to bite Taako twice once they’re out of the stables, and the second attempt is almost affectionate.

All told, after some getting accustomed to, it’s really not the world’s worst use of an afternoon — he would, in fact, prefer it to a swift arrow in the neck — but nobody’s got to know that.

Once they’re far enough out that the castle is a smear on the horizon behind them, Hurley slows and lets Taako fall into line with them. “Look,” she says, and points. “There along that ridge is the Centauri River. It connects runs all the way down the continent to end at some deposit in the midlands of Faerun. This time of year it’s frozen, but you can still see the fish running underneath.” She angles her finger in the opposite direction. “And that way’s the Black Vale. The ground’s frozen year-round there, so nobody can settle it. Two days’ travel across that and you’ll hit Goldcliff, which just so happens to be the prettiest little city this side of the Spine.”

“Richer than sin and twice as fun,” Sloane says. Her eyes shine like dark beads in the sunlight and her hair snaps energetically in the wind. “Wouldn’t you know, it was founded right above some of the deepest ore deposits on the continent. If you’ve ever worn something forged with high-karat gold, chances are it started out in our mines.”

Taako’s lungs still feel like someone took a torch to them, so he doesn’t make much reply except nodding in between gasps for breath.

“We’re fairly southerly, as the great houses go. Most of them are sequestered in the east, where where there’s more land, or at least land that isn’t stuck in the trap jaws of the mountains. House Crawford has a seat on the border with Anauroch, that’s why their head is usually Minister of Trade. Vast bulk of the farmlands are due north of here, on the banks of Mount Harrower, which used to be a volcano; nowadays it’s sleeping, but the soil’s good and rich. 

“Then, if you ride all the way west to the ocean, you’ll hit Sky’s End. That’s technically under domain of House Ravenstone, but it’s under stewardship of House Karmeister, since there’s no one to tend it while the prince is in Shadowfell.”

“Mm-hm,” he says, more interested in the ways his legs are threatening to collapse into jellied puddles.

Sloane gently chides her, “Stop boring the man, he’s only just catching his breath.”

“I’m educating him,” Hurley pouts.

“Educate him on the way. We’ve a while to the cliffs, and slowing down won’t kill us, either.” She stirs her shadowmount forward at a more sedate pace, treading comfortably over the powder drifts. “Taako, have you ever been to the Winterlands before?”

Not much risk to honesty, in this case. “No,” he says. “Never left Faerun, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh?” Hurley flanks him, boxing him in between the two of their war mounts. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke:  _two nobles and an elf ride into a frozen wasteland_ . “Is it what you expected?”

That one he can answer without an ounce of thought. “No. Not at all.”

“It often isn’t,” she says kindly. “A lot of people expect us to be . . . well, you know.”

He doesn’t, actually. “What?”

“Wild northern boors,” Sloane supplies, eliciting a wince from Hurley. “Snow-addled hermits. Hayseed philistines, backwoodsmen, cave dwellers . . .”

“But you’re not.”

“Thanks for that,” Sloane says dryly.

“What Sloane means,” Hurley says, raising both her voice and her eyebrows judiciously, “is that we didn’t wish you to get the wrong impression. Since the prince seems to like you, we figured you were probably all right, but it never hurts to ask for ourselves, eh?”

“He’s got a blind spot,” Sloane says, unprompted and without explanation. Then she stares at Taako as though she expects him to know what she means, which, he opens his mouth to readily fucking inform her, is a sorry misconception on her behalf, but he doesn’t get the chance before Hurley jumps in with a nervous cascade of a laugh.

“She means—”

“I mean what I said,” she interrupts, still watching Taako like he’s sprawled out before her on a butcher’s table. “I mean this, too: blind spots or no, there are many who would fall gratefully on the sword rather than see him come to harm.”

He remembers the assassination attempt, and his heart does a few acrobatic pirouettes. Did Kravitz tell them? Did they figure it out somehow on their own? 

He becomes suddenly and acutely aware that he is currently alone with them, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a pack of hideously dangerous animals for company, and Hurley keeps avoiding his gaze with a shiftiness that makes him want to bolt for the hills, pass be damned.

“Okay,” he says slowly, “see, I’m not an idiot, so I know when I’m being threatened, but the thing is, I don’t actually know what it’s  _for_ , so that’s really just a waste of a good line—”

“Don’t you?”

“No.” Argo picks up on his distress, and skitters forward, forcing both Sloane and Hurley to accelerate to keep stride. “Whatever weird junk you think I’m up to, I’m not. Homeboy just wants to get home.”

Sloane says, “The prince claims he’s promised you eleven thousand gold upon departure.”

Taako says, “Um.”

“He will not tell us what it’s for.”

“I . . . wait, holy shit, are you implying what I think you a—”

“Absolutely not,” Hurley exclaims. “We wouldn’t . . . for one thing, we wouldn’t think that of  _him_ .”

“You thought I was—”

“We didn’t think you were anything! We thought you were a stranger that the prince liked, and that was all. That’s why we wanted to speak with you. It’s discomfiting, having a stranger in the palace, especially with you being foreign, and the prince not telling us why you’re here — you understand.”

“So you took me out into the ice fields to threaten me?”

“Oh, come now,” Hurley says. “We’re not threatening you, Taako. It’s more of a . . . reminder, wouldn’t you say, Sloane?”

“No, I was threatening him,” Sloane says.

Despite the cold, his face has warmed to a fervor. In his face is enough heat to melt the tundra. In his face is fire and embarrassment the likes of which volcanoes chill beside. “Let me break things down,” he says, his voice somehow wrestling its way past a barricade of awkwardness in his throat. “Krav’s my friend, and he’s doing me a solid, and the rest has a lot to do with none of your business.”

“My business is the realm. The prince is the realm, and vice versa.”

“Pretty sure your business stops at his bedroom door, come to think of it, and I’ll wager he’d cosign that if he were here to hear it — speaking of which, does he know what you’re doing? Or what you’re asking? Because if I were him, I’d be pretty fucking offended, personally—”

“Calm down,” Hurley says, but he’s too angry to care for her orders or her title.

“I mean, by the Colors, do you have a fucking clue how creepy you sound? If you didn’t trust me — and you’d be perfectly fucking fine not to, I’m a stranger, no shit I’m shady, you might as well slap a warning sign on my back — you should have told  _him_ , not snuck around behind his back the minute he wasn’t here! It’s fine to threaten  _me_ , fuck if you’re the first person to do it and fuck if you’re the last, but Kravitz trusts both of you, and I’m pissed as hell on his behalf that you don’t trust him back enough to say it to his face when you think he’s fucking up!”

“Taako,” says Sloane forcefully. He’s breathing hard, ready to wheel and spit fire at her, but her calm stalls him. It gives him pause. It is not the response to be expected from a woman of her rank upon receiving insult, and it unnerves him like hell. 

“Would you believe me,” she says, an utter diplomat, “if I said that I did trust him?”

He’s already fucked as far as decorum is concerned; one more piece of honesty won’t do him harm. “Not much, your ladyship,” he bites off.

“Well, I do. Implicitly and absolutely. More than I trust my own right hand, as a matter of fact. He’s my closest friend, except for Hurley.”

A wind has picked up while they ride, and it flings a handful of stinging snow in his face. He watches it waltz a veil of glittering sugar-white particles across the planes. The landscape is beautiful, in an austere, minimalist kind of way. The mountains rise in one direction like towering tsunami of earth, but in the other it’s a straight shot to the horizon. White paint spilled across a blue canvas. There aren’t views like that in Faerun, nowhere’s got the space. He looks and it and feels a mixed-up, terrified kind of free.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing faith,” he says at length.

“I do,” she agrees. “And he knows.”

Argo stirs. Taako quiets him with a pat to the neck, absently, without thinking.

“It’s me you don’t trust, huh.”

She smiles. “You know, you’re fairly clever, when you’re not pretending to be stupid,” she says. Then she spurs her shadowmount and bounds forward, kicking up fits of snow-dust, leaving him alone with Hurley.

He says, “Your wife is weird as all shit.”

Hurley sighs, affectionately aggrieved. “I’d say it gets better when you get to know her,” she says, “but it doesn’t. Listen, do you actually want to see the Razorback Cliffs? I wasn’t lying about showing them to you. They’re a wonder.”

“Is it going to involve more interrogations? Because I’ll give those a hard pass, thanks.”

Her laugh is wry. They plod on slowly, the shadowmounts making quick work of a steep slope. “You’re a dedicate of Istus?” she inquires conversationally.

“Kind of. What tipped you off?”

“‘By the Colors.’” She sketches air quotes. “Don’t hear that one too often, around here.”

“Oh. Yeah, I mean. I guess.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Pray to her and everything, call her up on holidays and funerals, but. Me and God got a weird thing going on.”

“Don’t we all,” she says sagely, and he snorts. “You don’t strike me as a religious kind of person.”

“Hasn’t done much for me lately,” he says, thinking namely of John, and ten thousand gold pieces for the head of a prince, and honestly what was the fucking point of praying to a fate deity if you still ended up with shit luck?

Hurley purses her lips in a moue of disagreement. “With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She’s a god, not an errand boy.”

He makes a mildly dissenting noise in his throat. “It’s different when she isn’t so . . . I dunno. Like, the Raven Queen is basically micromanaging your whole deal, up here. Istus doesn’t get you shit but a couple holidays.”

“How do you know? Does she send you an itemized list of boons granted per annum?”

“Sorry, your ladyship, I hadn’t realized the two of you were so tight,” he says, mildly stung.

She exhales a breath followed by a chuckle. “Sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to be contrary. But we’re close to our god, up here, for understandable reasons. It’s just . . . odd to me, that someone wouldn’t be.”

A sour flavor of envy pervades him. Not of Hurley, per se, but of the security Hurley speaks with, as though the Raven Queen forms some stone tenant upon which the universe rests.

Not like he can just  _say_ that, though. Hurley can talk god all she wants, but Taako won’t follow her down that particular rabbit hole until he’s got some time and a good, strong drink under his belt. He’s danced in and out of this subject with Lup; even she can’t pry it out of him sober, which means Hurley’s not got a firework’s chance in a snowstorm.

A hacking cry splits the air, and he jerks his arm over his head out of instinct. 

A flock of ravens soars overhead, dozens upon dozens arrowing past them in a flurry of beating wings and horrid shrieks. The dark mass of them blots out the sun. Their shadow that swims quickly over the undulating ground, passing over Taako and Hurley in a heartbeat, and then continuing its race towards the castle.

He ducks out from under his arm, squinting suspiciously at the sky, and then rounds to watch them leave. His heartbeat wallops his ribs. He can’t remember ever seeing so many ravens in one place.

Hurley beckons to Sloane, who’s making her way back to them, and stirs her shadowmount. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s head back. Show you the Razorbacks another day, eh?”

“What?” He doesn’t want to object too loudly, in case — horror of horrors — she takes the suggestion and goes anyway, but he’s bemused. “Why are we stopping?”

Sloane rides past them, her shadowmount tossing up a cloud of dust. She tosses her head over her shoulder and bares her teeth in a grin. “He’s back,” she calls.

 

* * *

 

By the time he gets back the sun’s slipping low in the sky and half the castle is lit up fit to bleach out the stars, warm and merry in the wake of the city’s first sunny day. Servants are already carrying trays out from the dining hall, dirty dishes mounded on empty platters, and Taako spares a mournful look at one dilapidated tray of roast pheasant as it passes him in the hallway. Sloane and Hurley slink off somewhere to attend their own devices after retiring the shadowmounts, leaving him alone with a head full of confusion and a belly full of empty. 

He’s in a strange mood after coming back. He doesn’t want to be alone. Doesn’t want to be with anybody else. Ordinarily he’d go glue himself to Lup, whatever she was doing, but seeing as that’s not an option he’s stuck strung-out and antsy for no good reason. He turns his feet loose on the castle and finds himself padding up the hallway to the prince’s suite. 

Unusually, conversation bubbles up and echoes raucously from around the corner. The door’s ajar when he approaches, and when he peers into the crack he can barely see through the pack of people crowding around inside. Upon closer inspection it’s a handful of the lords, all talking over each other in loud chorus like a horrific perversion of a gospel round, and pinned at the heart of their gordian knot — slumped against his desk with his shoulders bent in a way that spells exhaustion, his eyes low — is Kravitz, looking for all the world as though he’d rather keel over and sleep for a thousand years than say another word to any of these bastards ever.

One of them is getting real up close and personal with him, shouting himself near red in the face, and that’s about when Taako decides that this shit won’t do at  _all_ . 

He kicks the door open. It slams against the wall with an earsplitting crack of wood. Amid various shrieks of surprise, he sweeps into the room, shoving two lords out of the way with summary disinterest.

“Hello,” he announces. “Don’t know who any of you assholes are, and I don’t care. You’re bothering me. Go somewhere else.”

“Taako,” Kravitz says, wide-eyed, and the flicker of disarmed happiness that darts across his face at the sight of Taako suits him terribly. Taako makes a significant effort not to be endeared. It does not work. “What—?”

“Hi, bubelah. Leave a note, next time, I got worried.”

The prince blinks, all surprise. “Sorry?”

“Excuse me,” one lord demands. Taako plants his hands on his hips and whirls on him. He curls his lip and puffs his cheeks as if he were regarding a mud stain on his britches.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who are you? We are amidst a conference.”

“Who am I?” Taako pauses for dramatic effect. “Who are you, whelp?”

The lord, thrown off balance, stutters. “I — Lord Geryon, of House—”

“Never mind, I don’t care. I,” Taako announces, drawing himself upright, “am Lord Taako of Phandalin, and I demand an apology for your insolence at  _once.”_

Geryon’s jaw falls open wordlessly. He turns helplessly to Kravitz, who is leaning against his desk with an inscrutable tilt to his head, watching Taako; by and by, as the courtiers continue to stare at him for guidance, he inclines his head.

“You heard Lord Taako,” he says softly. “Apologize to him. At once.”

Geryon pales. “My lord—”

“Do you insult me, sire?” Taako demands, insinuating himself neatly into the man’s personal space. “Do you insult me? Do you have the audacity suggest—”

“No, my lord, but—”

“—that I am not your superior? You dare to presume yourself my equal, insolent dog?”

“I . . . suppose not—”

“Get out,” Taako says, flourishing a hand at the door. “Disgust me no more. Leave.”

_“What?”_

“Go! Leave my sight! Is there something about your orders which confounds you?”

The lord opens his mouth, casts one more despairing look at Kravitz for help — none is offered — and swans out in a flurry of ruffled feathers and furious muttering.

After a moment, one follows. Then the rest of the lords slowly file after him, issuing a steady stream of complaints under their breath, none of them brave enough to voice one aloud. Kravitz watches them with something akin to awe and alarm both. Taako kicks the door shut behind the last one.

“So,” he says, rounding on Kravitz. “How pissed are they right now?”

“Unimaginably,” he says faintly. “Very much so. If I don’t end up getting knifed in my sleep after this, it’ll be no small wonder. I — Taako, how long have you been here?”

“Roughly? All of ten minutes.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Had to go put away the shadowmount, that took a while. Had to hunt down a groom and everything, and they’re not happy about having to handle those bitches, let me tell you. Not that I blame them. They’re straight-up evil bastards, you know that? At least with a horse, you know where you stand. You know they’re not gonna take a chunk outta you for the hell of it. I spent half my time on top of that thing drafting my will.”

“You went riding on a  _shadowmount?”_

“You were gone and I was bored.” He shrugs defensively. “And you told me to stop stealing shit. Kind of tied my hands here, buddy.”

“I didn’t mean it as an ultimatum,” Kravitz says weakly. “I meant . . . get a hobby, or — never mind. Who took you?”

“Sloane and Hurley.”

“Of course they did.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, of course they did. I should have — I’ll talk to them, I’m sorry. They can get carried away with themselves, but their intentions are good—”

“Nah, it was chill,” Taako lies, because he’s telling Kravitz about the particulars of his conversation with Hurley somewhere between  _death first_ and  _never_ . “I was really good with them, actually. Call me the shadowmount-whisperer. I am Taako, friend of beasts.”

“You’re not.”

“Fuck you, I could be.”

“But you’re not,” Kravitz says, with smiles dancing in his eyes, and a mouth trying very hard to stay flat.

“You know what you are? A cynic. A stone-cold cynic.”

“I’m really not.”

Taako plops himself on the desk next to Kravitz, who shifts over to make space for him. “So what was up with your lady liege?” He swings his ankles in midair.

“Oh,” Kravitz sighs, “an issue with the Eternal Stockade. The lords wanted to know about it, too. There’s been a series of attacks—”

“Shit, did you have to fight somebody?”

“No. It was a routine meeting. She just called at an inopportune time.”

“Hm.” There’s no fire in the grate, and the chill sweeps through his room easily. Taako shivers absentmindedly, missing the albeit mothball-scented warmth of the riding cloak.

The prince hesitates. “I heard it was sunny, today.”

Taako feigns indifference. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Gorgeous. You really missed a winner, with this one. I was starting to think your kingdom didn’t even have a sky, but hey, look at that, it does.”

Kravitz leans back and braces himself on the desk. Their hands are close, but not touching, on the dark wood. Taako eyes up the distance between them in a totally objective and logical mode of observation.

“When I came back, you were gone,” says the prince, in a way that is both totally casual and not casual at all. It vacillates wildly between coolness extremes. He is replete with Schrödinger’s chill.

“Well, we were out riding,” says Taako, which in terms of possible answers may very well be the stupidest. He’ll have to see. He may outdo himself yet.

“Right, but—” He exhales. Wets his lips. Taako watches. “For a moment, I thought—”

“Pass is still snowed in, my man,” Taako says lightly. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re stuck with me for a good long while yet.”

Kravitz sucks in a half-laugh of a breath and turns his head to look at him and suddenly oh, hello, their faces are pretty close together, and he can see the amber striations in his eyes and count the individual lashes that frame them, long and curled and dark and Taako needs to be on the opposite side of the room, maybe, possibly the palace, possibly the realm. 

He springs up. “Let’s go to the kitchen,” he says abruptly. 

There’s a good three seconds where Kravitz goes glassy-eyed with confusion at the abrupt change of topic and space. He blinks and says, “The kitchen?”

“Uh-huh. I missed dinner. And I’m hungry. So I wanna make something. And if cha’boy’s making something, trust me, you want in on it. So c’mon.” He swings open the door and doffs an exaggerated bow. “Chop chop. Up and at ’em.”

“Yes, my lord,” Kravitz says in a dutiful deadpan, sliding off the table, but the joke’s on him; as soon as he says it, Taako’s mouth goes too dry to laugh.

“That’s what I like to hear,” he says instead, except it comes out kind of high and funny, so he turns his back on Kravitz before his mouth can do any other dumb embarrassing shit like keep talking.

The prince follows him down the corridor. It’s a surreal experience. He resists the urge to check over his shoulder every few steps to make sure he’s still following, and not slipped off to some war meeting or library corner or vanished into smoke; but there he is, a fact corroborated by the soft tread of his footfalls on carpet. Even when Taako gets them lost and has to retread his steps up two hallways, he still follows with immutable, if smug, patience.

“You need to invest in some dumbwaiters,” Taako tells him determinedly, after hiking down three flights of stairs.

“I’ll put it on the list.”

“I’m serious. It’s that or get a litter to carry you around, because this? This is un-fucking-tenable. It cannot be tenned. My blisters have blisters. I’m on the verge of collapse, here. If I pass out from exertion, it’s on you, buddy.”

“I’m sorry,” says Kravitz, with what anyone else might mistake for genuine remorse, but Taako’s wise to him. “I’ll call for some smelling salts.”

Taako sticks out his tongue over his shoulder while he hauls open the kitchen door.

It’s graciously empty at this time of night. Only a few scullery maids cluster in the corners, all of who quickly scurry away at the sight of them.

Kravitz steps into the room slowly, almost cautiously, as if uncertain of his welcome or unfamiliar with the space. Taako, on the other hand, snags an apron from a hook and tugs his hair back with one of his bracelets, businesslike, moving with the snappy efficiency required in an industrial kitchen. There’s no reward for lallygagging when there’s food to be made, or to be eaten. That’s the first lesson anybody gets, as a chef. He calls, “What’re you feeling, big guy? Dealer’s choice.”

“You don’t have to,” Kravitz protests, but Taako flutters a hand to banish the idiotic demurral.

“I know I don’t have to. I’m still gonna. Besides,” he says, tugging his ponytail straight, “opportunity to get some Taako-brand home-cookin’ doesn’t come twice in a blue moon, pal. Might wanna jump on it while the getting’s good.”

“If you say so.” Kravitz settles himself on a stool, hesitantly. “What can you make?”

Taako scoffs. “Don’t insult me, Krav. S’ like walking up to a painter and ask what colors he can use.”

“All right,” he says, if not convinced then at least suitably intrigued to play along. “Surprise me.”

It’s the right answer, which is gratifying. Taako hauls out a pan.

Kravitz observes him while he cooks, which is as flattering as it is uncanny. It’s harder to keep a steady hand when someone’s watching each movement. The dough is a simple base — flour, sugar, salt, and a leavening agent, whisked with middling indifference and then dumped in a bath of hot water and milk — but it feels different, more difficult. When Kravitz coughs, he almost drops the dough he’s kneading.

“You’ve got something,” he says, and taps his nose, “just there,” and absently Taako reaches up to wipe it off with a hand still coated in flour from the dough, in the process scrubbing it indiscriminately across his upper lip. It tickles. His nose twitches.

He sneezes, and flour explodes in a puffed cloud around his head, settling in a fine mist over his hair.

Kravitz claps his hand over his mouth. His shoulders tremor. Taako narrows his eyes at him.

After a noble moment of struggle, he bursts out laughing.

It is, Taako will later reflect, the kind of laugh that Kravitz doesn’t just give away. It rocks out of the deep center of his chest, loud and helpless, and he leans back and tips his chin up and laughs and laughs and  _laughs_ like he’s never known worry in his life. He laughs himself breathless and silly with it. It is, in a word, enchanting.

Nevertheless, Taako is busy, embarrassed, and covered in flour, so there’s a limit to how much he can appreciate it in the moment.

“Yeah, laugh it up, buster. Don’t mind if you do, sitting there all high and mighty—”

“No, no, I’m not laughing at you,” he says, lying with baldfaced audacity. “I’m not, I promise—”

“Why don’t you help, huh? Come dig out the honey. I need a coating for these puppies.”

He slides off the stool, still chuckling. Apparently Taako’s severe misfortune is a real riot. “I don’t know where it is,” he calls, wandering over to the pantry. “You’ll have to direct me. I don’t spend a lot of time down here.”

“It’s the one in the mason jar, top right shelf, it’s this amberish yellow color—”

“I know what honey looks like, Taako.” His voice echoes from inside the pantry; he reemerges holding the honey jar, exasperatedly amused. “I’m not  _that_ cosseted.”

“Counterpoint: you use words like ‘cosseted’ in your day to day. You are exactly that cosseted.” Taako slices the dough into squares with a punctuational zeal. “Bring it over here. Grab the cinnamon while you’re in there, I’ve already got the sugar.”

“What are you making?”

He layers the squares down in a pan of frying oil. They sizzle nicely, puffing up from the heat. “It’s a surprise.”

“But I can see what you’re doing.”

“So it’s a shitty surprise, get off my dick.”

He ducks his head, smiling. “I’m sure it’s not.”

“Damn right it’s not.” The crusts are dimming to the pale edge of brown; he flips them over. “This one’s a common delicacy. No fancy shit required, just flour and sugar and lard.”

“Do you cook often?” Kravitz leans forward and cups his chin in his palm, watching Taako poke and prod at the pastries as they fry.

“Nah. I mean, I do. I try to. I’m fuckin’ good at it. Don’t have much of a kitchen back home, though.” He dumps out the sugar and starts whisking it together with the cinnamon, sharp short jerks of the wrist that make him seem busy.

“Why’s that?”

“On account of money not being a thing I got loads of, Krav, why’d’ya think?”

Kravitz frowns. He doesn’t say anything to that, which is just as well, since the pastries are done, and Taako’s attention is preoccupied spooning them each into the cinnamon-sugar bed in a way that doesn’t drizzle boiling oil down the front of his shirt. 

“Here,” he says, holding out one on a napkin. “Try.”

Carefully, the prince reaches up and takes it. Their hands don’t touch. 

(It’s not as though he cares, really, but still. He’s probably developing some kind of complex.)

“That’s really good.”

“Duh. You think?” Taako preens. “Oil and cinnamon and sugar. Can’t screw it up.”

“You have a real gift, Taako.”

“Again: duh.” He dusts off his hands and hoists himself up on the table, swinging his legs around to dangle beside Kravitz. “Here, gimme one. Don’t hog the plate.”

Kravitz slides it over. “You’re still covered in flour,” he says ruefully. “It’s all over. And that spot of it’s still on your nose.”

Taako holds up his cinnamon-dusted fingers. “That’s gonna a problem for future me,” he says drily.

“You could use a napkin.”

“Uh, no. Waste of good cinnamon.” Demonstratively, he licks his thumb from knuckle to tip. “This stuff’s expensive as  _shit_ . I think it runs up there with gold, in cost per ounce? Anyway, I’mnot throwing it away.”

Kravitz says, a bit thickly, “We can get you more cinnamon,” but Taako just shrugs and licks the tip of his pointer finger.

“Waste not, want not, my man.”

He makes a vaguely dissenting noise in the back of his throat, still fixated on the flour smear on Taako’s nose. For one delirious moment, Taako wonders if he’s going to reach out and wipe it off himself, and isn’t  _that_ a shot.

“No,” he says faintly. “No, I suppose not.” He rubs the side of his nose, seemingly without thinking, and returns to his pastry with a focus that borders on fervor.

Taako wants — something.

A nebulous, immaterial . . . something, bigger than he can grasp all at once, deeper than he’s comfortable acknowledging. But he wants it. He wants it badly.

Taako’s not used to waiting for the things he wants. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to handle wanting this one, not when he barely knows what it is.

Kravitz notices him staring. “What?” 

“You’ve got something,” Taako lies, and reaches out. Kravitz follows his finger as it nears his face, stilled in rapt wariness, and Taako thinks for a minute he’ll let—

He draws away with blurring speed, whisking himself off the table and carrying himself near halfway across the room in the process. Standing awkwardly at the midpoint between Taako and the doorway, a rigid discomfort asserts itself in the line of his shoulders, a panicky dismay in the tight curl of his hands.

Taako’s arm drops limply at his side. His face is warm and his mouth is dry.

“I have to go,” says Kravitz, and at least he sounds flustered, too. That’s some small recompense for the cold pit in Taako’s stomach. “It was a long day, and I should . . . rest.”

“Oh. Um.”

_What’s wrong?_ he does not demand.

“Okay,” he says coolly, and gestures somewhat unkindly at the door. “See ya, then.”

Something deflates in Kravitz. He is a lanced pocket of air, suddenly emptied. He is so obviously unhappy it reads as a plea. But if he’s reluctant to go, he doesn’t say so. He dips a short bow. “Good night.”

“Night,” Taako echoes hollowly. There’s no meaning to it. He hears the door open and shut and then that’s it; he’s alone.

 

* * *

 

_P.S. This guy’s going to kill me, Lup. I swear to god, he is._


End file.
